Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a fun one. I started mentally connecting the purple category answers right away. Movie-goers and TV watchers, this is a good puzzle for you. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Meet the new boss.

Green group hint: SNL star.

Blue group hint: WNBA player.

Purple group hint: They’re not real.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Coaching decisions.

Green group: Will Ferrell sports movies.

Blue group: Associated with Diana Taurasi.

Purple group: Fictional coaches.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is coaching decisions. The four answers are extend, fire, hire and promote.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Will Ferrell sports movies. The four answers are Blades of Glory, Kicking & Screaming, Semi-Pro and Talladega Nights.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is associated with Diana Taurasi. The four answers are Connecticut, Phoenix, six golds and White Mamba.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is fictional coaches. The four answers are Bombay, Buttermaker, Dale and Lasso.

Way, way back in the days when men wore beards and wide-lapelled suits in exotic colors, only NASA had access to photovoltaics and ‘solar’ meant solar thermal. In those days of appropriate technology, it was thought that the ultimate in thermal mass was a phase-change material– a salt or wax that in melting and re-freezing could hold far more heat than plain rock or water, which were more often used. Well, now that it’s the 21st century, we’ve got something even better. As Ars Technica reports about a recent paper in Science Magazine, Molecular Solar Thermal (MOST) energy storage can blow that old stuff right out of the water.

Molecular energy storage? That’s where the sunburn comes in. A sunburn occurs because proteins in your skin are denatured– kinked, twisted, and knocked out of shape– by ultraviolet light. The researchers realized that those kinky proteins are pretty energetic: like a spring, they’re storing energy in their distorted structure. Even better, certain chemicals, like the pyrimidone in the study, don’t ‘relax’ the way a phase change material does. It’s not a matter of warming up and giving up the energy stored in the molecular structure when cooling down– the energy needs coaxed out, in this case by an acidic solution.

That poses problems for a closed-loop system, since you’d be continuously diluting the pyrimidone with heat-releasing acid and neutralizing base. On the other hand, 1.65 MJ/kg of energy storage is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re collecting it with nothing more technically advanced than a fluid running through clear tubing. Conveniently enough, researchers found a way to make this stuff liquid at room temperature.

Comparing the heat in this MOST storage material to electrical potential in a battery is a case of apples and oranges, but in terms of pure energy density the pyrimidone cooked up for the paper is in the same range as Li-Ion batteries. There is some self-discharge, in that the altered “dewar” state of the pyrimidone decays naturally, but with a half-life of upto 481 days, you could imagine storing up a tankful UV-altered pyrimidone all year round to provide your winter’s heat.

It’s not perfect. Right now you get about 20 “charge cycles” before the molecules break down, but then, if you’re using this for seasonal load-spreading, a two-decade service life is nothing to shake a stick at. It’s only collecting energy from the UV range of the spectrum, which is a tiny fraction of the energy from our sun. The quantum efficiency of the molecule is rather poor as well– it takes a lot of photons to get a dewar transition.

With solar photovaltaics being as cheap as they are, thermal builds are few and far between– even solar water heaters are powered by PV these days. Of course if you’re somewhere that doesn’t get much sun, you could always go for wind power instead.

Thanks to [zit] for the tip! If you’ve seen a bright idea in the wild, or have one yourself, our tips line is open rain or shine.

Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t be its death when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% over the previous year, with both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May.

Net income landed at $7.46 billion, and the company offered strong guidance for the year ahead, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a 10% to 11% increase. It also said its “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a figure that shows revenue under contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue.

The numbers, though, could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered lately. Investors fear the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The situation has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”

The concept hung so heavily in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.

“You’ve heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he said, later adding, “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it may be eaten by the Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”

In an attempt to convince the world of its continued health, Salesforce threw everything and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The company increased its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new $50 billion share buyback program. That’s always a favorite with shareholders because it both creates a sturdy buyer of shares and reduces the number of shares in circulation (which can boost the stock price).

The company also revamped the earnings call itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part normal Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.

Instead of running through the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify to their love of its new agentic options: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, just to hammer the point, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry conference and media company. We’ll truncate the interviews to the shortest summary: They all love Salesforce’s AI agent products.

Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agentic products: agentic work units (“AWU”). The idea here is that rather than simply counting “tokens” — the standard unit of AI processing volume — AWU attempts to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent actually completed a task, like writing to a record, rather than just generating text. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot but really is not in the AI world.)

“You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but that’s not really all that valuable in the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the call. So AWU is intended to measure when the agent writes to a record or does some other verifiable task.

On top of that, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision of the coming world of agents. It shows SaaS software like itself owning most of the tech stack, with the AI model makers on the bottom as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines.

This was a direct counter to one of the causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural vision shows OpenAI owning most of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the databases and business-software platforms where companies store their core data) on the bottom as the unseen engines.

And if all that wasn’t enough to influence investors: Benioff was dressed in a black leather jacket, echoing the signature look of the CEO clearly crushing it in the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Tesla or Toyota
Answer: CAR

4A clue: What the “M” of BMX stands for
Answer: MOTO

5A clue: Leafy lunch
Answer: SALAD

6A clue: Weighing device
Answer: SCALE

7A clue: “To be,” in Latin
Answer: ESSE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Pepsi and Coke
Answer: COLAS

2D clue: Dickens’s “___ of Two Cities”
Answer: ATALE

3D clue: Took to another floor, as the [circled letters]
Answer: RODE

4D clue: Apple computers
Answer: MACS

5D clue: Dir. from San Francisco to Santa Monica
Answer: SSE

Samsung‘s new Galaxy S26 lineup is by no means a reinvention of the popular smartphone brand. Instead, it’s a collection of design tweaks and some important, even one-of-a-kind, under-the-hood updates that could change the way you use your phone.

The best features, like the actually unique Privacy Display (a first for mobile phones), are confined to the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Not surprising when you consider it’s the true flagship, and the S26 and S26 Plus are more or less like bridesmaids carrying the bride’s lengthy train.

This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Petlibro

We spend a significant amount of time optimizing our own health: tracking our sleep, monitoring our heart rates, and dialing in our nutrition. But when it comes to our pets, we’re usually left guessing. Cats, in particular, are notorious for hiding pain or illness until a condition becomes severe.

Petlibro is shifting that dynamic with the Luma Smart Litter Box. Since its quiet launch late last year, it has quickly become a staple in thousands of modern households. It moves the concept of a self-cleaning litter box past mere convenience, turning an unpleasant daily chore into a sophisticated system for early health awareness.

AI waste analysis and health tracking

For the data-driven pet owner, the Luma Smart Litter Box provides a level of insight that was previously impossible to get without a vet visit. It’s equipped with an AI waste analysis system that differentiates between pee and poop, and can even identify the consistency of the waste.

Every time your cat uses the box, the system logs their weight and tracks their bathroom behavior. If your cat skips the box for 24 hours, or if there’s a sudden shift in their routine, the app sends a smart alert to your phone. For senior cats or those with sensitive stomachs or kidney issues, this continuous cat health monitoring gives you a critical head start on potential medical problems.

Multi-cat recognition and safety

If you have more than one cat, tracking who did what is usually a guessing game. Luma solves this with a built-in 1080p HD camera and advanced AI that recognizes up to 10 different cats from any angle, even from behind. You get individualized logs and video records for each pet, so you always know exactly whose health you are looking at.

Safety is also a non-negotiable factor with autonomous tech. Since hitting the market in November 2025, Luma has maintained a 100% safe-use record. It features a wide-open, spacious design rather than a cramped globe, and uses triple-check sensors with an anti-pinch system to ensure your cat is completely clear before the cleaning cycle begins.

Autonomous cleaning and odor control

Beyond the health metrics, this is still a highly engineered piece of smart home hardware designed to keep your space clean. It automatically sweeps waste into a sealed drawer after each visit, holding up to seven days of waste for two cats.

To ensure your home doesn’t smell like a pet sanctuary, it utilizes an active odor-control system. A built-in fan pulls air through carbon filters, filtering out 97% of odors, with adjustable fan speeds controlled directly from the app. It’s a quiet, seamless integration into a well-kept home.

The bottom line

The Petlibro Luma represents a maturation in pet technology. It is a smart litter box for cats that respects the aesthetics of your home while acting as a daily preventive care tool for your pets. It replaces guesswork with hard data, offering peace of mind that your cat’s health is always being monitored.

Looking for a new pair of earbuds to pair with your favorite iPhone or iPad? Right now, you can grab the Apple AirPods Pro 3 for just $229 on Amazon or Best Buy, a $20 break from their usual price. They’re our favorite wireless headphones for iPhone owners, with great noise-canceling, easy connectivity, and unique features like heart rate and live translation.

The active noise-canceling on the third generation AirPods Pro has improved a great deal, with our reviewer Parker Hall comparing them to the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 Earbuds when it comes to filtering out all but the highest frequency, loudest noises. The improved ear tips, now lined with foam, are more comfortable and fit better in smaller ears, with four different sizes to choose from. They also have better sound isolation, which improves the noise canceling and transparency mode performance noticeably.

While Android owners have a variety of choices when it comes to earbuds and headphones, iOS users will appreciate the extra features specifically built for anyone in the Apple ecosystem. If you’re into running with minimal devices, the AirPods Pro 3 can actually take your heart rate through your ears, a neat trick that we found surprisingly consistent with other fitness trackers. Another unique feature, live translation, will bring up the Translate app on iOS and relay what someone else is saying directly into your ears in your own language. Once again, we were impressed by how fast and accurate the system was, and as more languages are added it will become even more useful.

We really only had two minor complaints about the AirPods Pro 3, one of which was that the default EQ is a bit V-shaped, with a slightly overdone bass that’s either really appealing or slightly grating. Thankfully you can tweak your EQ in Spotify or Apple Music to dial in that experience. The other issue is that these have limited compatibility with Android devices, so if you’re on a Samsung or Pixel, you’ll want to check out our other favorite earbuds. For iPhone and iPad owners looking for the latest and greatest for their listening experience, the discounted AirPods Pro 3 are an excellent choice.

Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
The Cranium Nebula has piqued astronomers’ interest, due to some stunning new images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. These photos reveal the layers of a faraway cloud of gas and dust wrapped tightly around a star as it begins to die. This planetary nebula, officially known as PMR 1 and informally known as the exposed Cranium due to its uncanny appearance to a brain tucked inside a phantom skull, sits quietly in a backwater area of space that has only recently gained attention.

Webb captured the entire scene with two of its most powerful tools, beginning with its Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, which produces a crystal clear image with innumerable background stars and distant galaxies piercing the nebula’s veil like tiny needles. A prominent dark channel runs vertically down the center, plainly dividing the entire image into left and right parts that resemble cerebral hemispheres. The outer edge has a faint, almost white glow, while the middle is a deep orange, with clouds that appear to be pushed outwards from the center in a sequence of waves, as if they were colliding in midair.

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When you switch to the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the entire picture changes. The cosmic dust blazes brightly in a variety of tones that can make you just feel the texture. The same center black lane remains visible, of course, but you can now see where all of the material being emitted by the central star is heading. Stuff is rushing out at the top and bottom, probably in two large opposing jets that chisel their way through the inner gas, providing intricacy to the nebula’s overall shape.

That level of information is a significant improvement over what the Spitzer Space Telescope was capable of more than a decade ago. Spitzer was the first to reveal the brain-like shape, but it was like gazing at the Cranium from a distance; all you could see was the overall outline. The Webb, on the other hand, allows you can see the fine features much more clearly and demonstrates how different wavelengths of light can highlight different parts of the nebula. The near-infrared shows the dust getting blown away, while in the mid-infrared, the dust itself is lit up like a stage.

With its rapid-fire bursts, this nebula tells the story of a star that is running out of fuel and beginning to shed its outer layers. The inner area is a jumble of heavier gases and more intriguing patterns, whereas the outside shell is primarily composed of hydrogen that was expelled early. Things are becoming quite crazy in there, as evidenced by the central dark channel, which is most likely the result of a big outburst or couple of jets. It could finish up as a tiny, slowly cooling white dwarf or explode as a supernova, depending on the star’s initial characteristics, size, and other factors.