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Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for July 21, No. 301. Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto. 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. Golf knowledge is a weak point for me, so I struggled a little with today’s Connections: Sports Edition. It’s nice to see an appearance from one of the best team names in minor league ball. Hello, Yard Goats fans. Stuck? Check out our hints and get the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That’s a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn’t show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can continue to play it 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: Don’t skip this step. Green group hint: Par for the course. Blue group hint: Constitution state. Purple group hint: Not bored. Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups Yellow group: Get ready for a game. Green group: Golf wedges. Blue group: Connecticut teams. Purple group: _____ board. Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers? The completed NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for July 21, 2025. NYT/Screenshot by CNET The yellow words in today’s Connections The theme is get ready for a game. The four answers are get loose, prepare, stretch and warm up. The green words in today’s Connections The theme is golf wedges. The four answers are gap, lob, pitching and sand. The blue words in today’s Connections The theme is Connecticut teams. The four answers are Sun, UConn, Yale and Yard Goats. The purple words in today’s Connections The theme is _____ board. The four answers are back, leader, skate and surf. Read More

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles. Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a tough one. Once you see the theme, you’ll know why — really, there are so many words that could have been answers, because you can craft any and all shapes out of paper. If you need hints and answers, read on. I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.  If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page. Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far Hint for today’s Strands puzzle Today’s Strands theme is: I fold! If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Japanese paper art. Clue words to unlock in-game hints Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work: SHIFT, CANT, RANT, NITE, GRAM, BURY, CANE, CORE, BORE, GRIME, LOME, MOLE, FEATHER, WOLF, FLOW Answers for today’s Strands puzzle These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers: KITE, BOAT, FISH, FROG, CRANE, BUTTERFLY, HEART, FLOWER Today’s Strands spangram The completed NYT Strands puzzle for July 21, 2025, #505. NYT/Screenshot by CNET Today’s Strands spangram is ORIGAMI. To find it, look for the O that’s four letters down on the far-left row, and wind across in a zig-zag pattern. Read More

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 21, #771. CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line. Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, and generational studies Credentials Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won “Headline Writer of the Year”​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism. Looking for the most recent 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, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Hey, Seinfeld fans, today’s NYT Connections puzzle is right up your alley. That makes the blue category fun, but that purple category got me, as always. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak. Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time Hints for today’s Connections groups Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group, to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group. Yellow group hint: Top it off. Green group hint: Liquid can change forms. Blue group hint: Big salad, puffy shirt. Purple group hint: A certain symbol. Answers for today’s Connections groups Yellow group: Additional perk. Green group: Phase transitions for liquids. Blue group: Concepts from “Seinfeld.” Purple group: What ‘ can indicate. Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words What are today’s Connections answers? The completed NYT Connections puzzle for July 21, 2025, #771. NYT/Screenshot by CNET The yellow words in today’s Connections The theme is additional perk. The four answers are bonus, extra, gravy and icing. The green words in today’s Connections The theme is phase transitions for liquids. The four answers are condensation, freezing, melting and vaporization. The blue words in today’s Connections The theme is concepts from “Seinfeld.” The four answers are Festivus, regifting, shrinkage and yada yada. The purple words in today’s Connections The theme is what ‘ can indicate. The four answers are contraction, foot, possessive and quote. Read More

The iPad Pro with the M5 chip is expected to be just as easy to use for selfies in a landscape or portrait orientation. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple will add a second front-facing camera on the portrait edge of the upcoming iPad Pro that’s expected to launch later this year. It may seem

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the goings on in the indie game space. It’s been quite the busy spell, with several notable games debuting or landing on more platforms and some intriguing upcoming projects popping above the parapet. The Steam Automation Fest is taking place this week (it runs until July 21 at 1PM

If I had to describe the status of Subnautica 2 in just three words, it would be these: messy, messy, messy. That’s not to say the game itself is in terrible shape — this is actually a pivotal claim in the whole situation — but the relationship between Subnautica series developer Unknown Worlds and its

Samsung announced its newest devices during its Galaxy Unpacked event on July 9. That happened to fall on the second day of Amazon’s Prime Day event. Do big tech companies not know what the others are doing? Do they care? Do they like making the lives of tech reporters difficult? I didn’t have time to

Chinese President Xi Jinping has bluntly questioned a nationwide rush of investment into the AI and EV industries. As deflation anxiety grows and Trump’s trade war with China ramps up, the world’s second largest economy is turning to fast-growth tech industries to remain competitive. But Xi appears to think that the strategy is flawed. As

Few companies have grown as quickly as Tesla, especially just before and after the company launched the Model 3, its first affordable EV. “We scaled Tesla in 30 months from $2 billion in revenue to $20 billion in revenue,” Jon McNeil, the former president of Tesla who is now co-founder and CEO of DVx Ventures, told the crowd at TechCrunch’s All Stage event in Boston. It wasn’t McNeil’s first time scaling companies, nor would it be his last. Previously, he founded six different companies, and after Tesla, he joined Lyft as COO before starting his own venture firm, where he’s launched a dozen startups. Over the years, McNeil has developed a playbook that helps him identify when a company is ripe for scaling. He shared those insights last week with the audience at TechCrunch All Stage 2025. When assessing a company’s potential to scale, McNeil primarily judges them on two different measures, product-market fit and go-to-market fit. It’s not unusual for investors to focus on those concepts, but McNeil has distilled them into two objective measures. For product-market fit, he asks each startup, “do 40% of your customers say they cannot live without your product,” he said. If not, then the company isn’t ready.  “We keep adding, adding, adding and tweaking the product until we get to 40% and then we say, okay, boom, now we’ve got product market fit,” McNeil said. “It’s actually objective and measured. It’s not a feeling, it’s not a sense. It’s a metric.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 McNeil added, “We did a study of businesses that actually achieved breakout, and those businesses achieved breakout at roughly that 40% acceptance level.” Second, McNeil looks at whether the company has a mature go-to-market strategy. Specifically, he’s interested in whether the amount a company spends to acquire customers, known as customer acquisition cost (CAC), is sufficiently below the total lifetime value (LTV) that the customer will bring the company.  When a company starts pulling in four times more money over the life of the customer than it spent to acquire them — an LTV to CAC ratio of four-to-one — that’s when he knows the company is ready. “Then we pour in the cash. But before then, we’re doling out cash $100,000 at a time just to get to different stage gates,” he said. Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor. De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College. View Bio Read More

Autonomous robotics startup Cartken, known for its four-wheeled robots that deliver food on college campuses and through Tokyo’s bustling streets, has found a new area of focus: industrials.  Cartken co-founder and CEO Christian Bersch told TechCrunch that applying its delivery robots to industrial settings was always in the back of his mind as they built the startup. When companies started reaching out about using their robots in factories and labs, Cartken took a closer look. “What we found is that actually there’s a real big need in industrial and onsite use cases,” said Bersch, who co-founded the startup along with other former Google engineers behind the Bookbot project. “Sometimes there have even [been] more direct value to companies optimizing their material flows or their production flows.” In 2023, the startup landed its first big industrial customer, German manufacturing company ZF Lifetec. Initially, ZF Lifetec used its existing delivery robots, called the Cartken Courier, which can hold 44 pounds and resembles an Igloo cooler on wheels.  “Our food delivery robot started moving production samples around, and it’s quickly turned into our busiest robot of all,” Bersch said. “That’s when we said, hey, there’s like real use cases and real market need behind it, and that’s when we started targeting that segment more and more.” At the time, Cartken was still pressing ahead on its delivery sidewalk business, including locking in partnerships with Uber Eats and GrubHub for its last-mile delivery operations across U.S. college campuses and in Japan. But that early success with ZF, encouraged the startup founders, which includes Jake Stelman, Jonas Witt and Anjali Naik, to expand its business model. Switching Cartken’s robots from food delivery to an industrial setting, wasn’t much of a challenge, Bersch said. The AI behind the robots is trained on years of food delivery data and the devices are designed to traverse various terrains and weather conditions.  Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 This means the robots can travel between indoor and outdoor settings. And thanks to data collected from delivering food on Tokyo streets, the robots are able to react and maneuver around obstacles.  Image Credits:Cartken Cartken, which has raised more than $20 million from 468 Capital, Incubate Fund, Vela Partners, and other venture firms, has started to build out its robotic fleet to reflect its pivot to industrials. The company released the Cartken Hauler earlier this year, which is a larger version of the Cartken Courier and can hold up to 660 pounds. The company also released the Cartken Runner, designed for indoor deliveries, and is also working on something similar to a robotic forklift.  “We have a navigation stack that is parameterizable for different robot sizes,” Bersch said. “All the AI and machine learning and training that went into that is like transferring directly to the other robots.” Cartken recently announced that it was deepening its four-year relationship with Japanese automaker Mitsubishi, which originally helped the company get the needed certifications to operate their delivery robots on the streets of Tokyo.  Melco Mobility Solutions, a company under the Mitsubishi umbrella, just announced that it will be buying nearly 100 Cartken Hauler robots for use in Japanese industrial facilities.  “We’re definitely seeing a lot of traction across various industrial and corporate sites, from automotive companies to pharmaceutical to chemical,” he said. “All these companies typically have people moving stuff from one building to another, whether it’s being by hand, on a cart ,or a small forklift, and that is really what we’re targeting.” Cartken will still continue its food and consumer last-mile delivery business, but it won’t be expanding it, Bersch said, adding they still do a lot of testing for new capabilities on these existing last-mile delivery routes.  Becca is a senior writer at TechCrunch that covers venture capital trends and startups. She previously covered the same beat for Forbes and the Venture Capital Journal. View Bio Read More