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Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Aug. 20, #331

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 leans heavy on West Coast teams, so hope you know those! Read on for hints and 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 A

Facebook and Instagram now offer AI-powered dubbing for video creators

Meta announced today a new AI-based translation tool for creators on Instagram and Facebook. The company uses artificial intelligence to automatically dub videos in other languages, with support for lip-syncing and voice cloning that promises to preserve the creator’s tone and delivery. Here’s how to use it. Meta AI promises good auto-dubbing with voice matching and lip sync Right now, the feature supports two-way translations between English and Spanish, and Meta says that “more languages com

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Aug. 20, #801

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. Today's NYT Connections puzzle is a real headache. The NYT puzzle writers are really pulling some obscure connections out of the air, and I did not do well today at all. Need some help? Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot

The Star-Studded Trailer for ‘Anniversary’ Takes a Dystopian Detour

The best trailers make you want to see a movie but also leave you unsure exactly what it’s about. The first trailer for Anniversary, which stars Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Dylan O’Brien, Phoebe Dynevor, and others, does just that. To start, it looks like a slick thriller about an out-of-place new girlfriend causing havoc. From there, though, a few twists and turns reveal the world of the film is much, much darker than you’d expect. Then you throw in a star of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the intrigu

Microsoft employees occupy headquarters in protest of Israel contracts

is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets. On Tuesday, a group of current and former Microsoft employees, as well as community members, took over a plaza at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, as part of a No Azure for Apartheid protest. They declared the area a “Liberated Zone” encampment and said they had changed its name from East Campus Plaza to “The Mar

Crypto stocks tumble as investors go into risk-off mode

Meanwhile, the price of bitcoin pulled back nearly 3% to just over $113,000. Ether was down more than 4% to the $4,100 level, according to Coin Metrics. Investors appeared to rotate out of tech names Tuesday. The sector had seen a boost last week as traders weighed the prospect of more interest rate cuts. Also, bitcoin touched an intraday all-time high near $125,000 last week. On Tuesday, the Nasdaq Composite was down more than 1%, weighed down by declines in Nvidia and other tech heavyweights

Databricks says it's valued at over $100 billion in latest funding round

Databricks has just entered an exclusive club. The data analytics software vendor said Tuesday that it's raising a funding round that values the company at over $100 billion. That would make Databricks just the fourth private company to eclipse the $100 billion mark, following SpaceX, ByteDance and OpenAI, according to data from CB Insights. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC's Brian Sullivan that the total round will exceed $1 billion. The company was last valued by private investors at $62

Forklifts require training

A lot gets covered in today's discourse about AI in software development. Most of it is noise, ranging from nihilism that we're all writing mediocre code anyway so why does it matter to endless wannabe AI influencers doing engagement bait on Twitter. Every new model release gets a bunch of threadicles 👇 amounting to the 2025 version of "Safari feels snappier". Some of it is useful, mostly crafty developers in the community sharing novel ways they're using it to solve hard problems or draw inspir

The new geography of stolen goods

Britain | Grand Theft Global Inc The new geography of stolen goods Cars, phones, tractors: how high-end products are increasingly stolen to serve distant markets T he MSC Ruby is almost ready to leave Felixstowe. Seven remote-controlled gantry cranes are still at work, stacking containers in the ship’s bays. Some 11,000 containers pass through this port each day, making it Britain’s primary conduit to the arteries of global trade. The ­Ruby’s next call is Gran Canaria—then, the long run down th

Researchers Find Strange Link Between Marathon Running and Cancer

Some of the most physically fit people in the world may have a unique health risk. New research uncovers a possible link between marathon running and colorectal cancer. Oncologists at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute in Virginia conducted the study, which examined the colons of relatively young people who had run several long-distance races. They found these runners had a much higher rate of having potentially dangerous adenomas (a type of polyp) than would be expected for their age. Though the

Psychiatrists Warn That Talking to AI Is Leading to Severe Mental Health Issues

In a jarring new analysis, psychiatric researchers found that a wide swath of mental health issues have already been associated with artificial intelligence usage — and virtually every top AI company has been implicated. Sifting through academic databases and news articles between November 2024 and July 2025, Duke psychiatry professor Allen Frances and Johns Hopkins cognitive science student Luciana Ramos discovered, as they wrote in a new report for the Psychiatric Times, that the mental healt

Crypto stocks tumble on Tuesday as investors go into risk-off mode

The Coinbase logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen with stock market percentages in the background. Meanwhile, the price of bitcoin pulled back nearly 3% to just over $113,000. Ether was down more than 4% to the $4,100 level, according to Coin Metrics. Crypto stocks suffered on Tuesday as investors fled tech stocks and riskier corners of the market. Investors appeared to rotate out of tech names on Tuesday. The sector had seen a boost last week as traders weighed the prospect of more int

Kirby Air Riders launches November 20 exclusively on Switch 2

Nintendo has confirmed that Kirby Air Riders, a modern revival of the 2003 GameCube cult classic Kirby Air Ride, will be released exclusively on Switch 2 on November 20. The announcement came during a marathon 45-minute Nintendo Direct devoted entirely to the new game, hosted by Kirby's creator Masahiro Sakurai. Sakurai said he was asked to create Air Riders while still working on DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate , and drafted a written proposal for the game at the request of Shinya Takahashi,

Scammers are sneaking into Google's AI summaries to steal from you - how to spot them

Moor Studio/ DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Scammers are exploiting AI to trick people looking for customer numbers. Google's AI Overview, AI Mode, and OpenAI's ChatGPT are vulnerable. Run a regular search or head to the company's website to find a number. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Do you ever use Google's AI-powered search to look for customer service numbers and other contact i

CPG startup Keychain snags $30M to build in India, grow in the US

Keychain, a U.S. startup that helps consumer brands find manufacturing partners, has raised $30 million in fresh funding as it looks to scale its India-based development team to drive growth in North America. While headquartered in New York, Keychain operates as a distributed company with its core engineering and product development centered in India. The startup is doubling down on this model with the new funding, aiming to grow its engineering, product design, and analytics teams in Gurugram

Meta rolls out AI-powered translations to creators globally, starting with English and Spanish

Meta is rolling out an AI-powered voice translation feature to all users on Facebook and Instagram globally, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature, which is available in any market where Meta AI is available, allows creators to translate content into other languages so it can be viewed by a broader audience. The feature was first announced at Meta’s Connect developer conference last year, where the company said it would pilot test automatic translations of creators’ voices in reels

Sony Inzone launches new peripherals in collaboration with Fnatic

Inzone dropped a fresh batch of gaming peripherals today. Sony introduced the Inzone line in 2022 and it offers peripherals such as monitors and earbuds for gaming consumers. The new wave of gaming gear was developed with major esports organization Fnatic, and the specs are meant to target competitive players. All of the items are available for pre-order today. The lineup includes a pair of audio devices: the Inzone H9 II Wireless Gaming Headset and the Inzone E9 In-Ear Monitor. The H9 II heads

Sony and Microsoft continue to make nice with Halo x Helldivers 2 crossover

Helldivers 2 is getting a Halo crossover. On August 26, gear inspired by Halo 3: ODST will be available in the Sony-published Helldivers game. Practically speaking, this is about some new armor, guns and abilities — just another Tuesday in the gaming world. But symbolically, it evokes Sonic the Hedgehog's first appearance on a Nintendo console. The crossover's arrival coincides with Helldivers 2's arrival on Xbox Series X/S. (That's also on August 26.) It also comes amid rumors that Halo: The M

Elastic rejects claims of a zero-day RCE flaw in Defend EDR

Enterprise search and security company Elastic is rejecting reports of a zero-day vulnerability impacting its Defend endpoint detection and response (EDR) product. The company's statement follows a blog post from a company called AshES Cybersecurity claiming to have discovered a remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Elastic Defend that would allow an attacker to bypass EDR protections. Elastic’s Security Engineering team "conducted a thorough investigation" but could not find "evidence supportin

New York City Is Stuck With a $45 Million EV Fleet That’s Glitchy as Hell

There’s going green for the sake of the planet, and then there’s going green as part of a policy initiative that winds up buying a bunch of glitch-plagued electric vehicles from a company that went bankrupt and can no longer service them. The latter is the exact story of a New York-based company called American Lease, which has spent around $45 million for 2,800 cars from Fisker, a now-dead EV startup that only made 11,000 of that model in its short life anyway, and is now using them as part of

How to Watch 'KPop Demon Hunters' in Theaters for Two Days Only

Netflix's KPop Demon Hunters is getting a short sing-along run in theaters, which means fans can belt out the film's catchy songs with a real-life crowd. Let's just hope there aren't any demons lurking around. A sing-along version of KPop Demon Hunters -- the streaming service's most-watched original animated movie ever -- will hit movie theater screens this weekend in countries including the US and Canada. The Netflix film premiered June 20 and follows superstars and covert demon hunters Rumi,

Physics of badminton’s new killer spin serve

Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before the racket contacts the shuttlecock (aka the birdie). It's so effective—some have called it "impossible to return"—that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) banned the spin serve in 2023, at least until after the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris. The sanction wasn

“Kirby Air Riders” Is Coming to Switch 2, and It’s “Basically Like ‘Mario Kart’”

More than two decades after Kirby Air Ride launched on GameCube, Kirby Air Riders is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 on November 20. Director Masahiro Sakurai announced the news in a Nintendo Direct that aired today, alongside a detailed look at the upcoming racing game. “It basically is like Mario Kart,” Sakurai says. The sequel is also the first Kirby title to be directed by fan favorite Sakurai since the original. “Oh dear,” Sakurai said during the Direct. “Why is making a game so hard?” Air R

This new C-suite role is more important than ever in the AI era - here's why

calvindexter / DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Customer experience officer is still a relatively new role. A majority of experience officers are fresh to their position. Officers spend time with customers and analyzing key metrics. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. I've long felt that "customer experience officer" should be everyone's role, regardless of job title. However, this C-suite p

Months After Switch 2 Launch, Most Controllers Still Lack This Vital Feature

Switch 2 gamers who come home bone tired after a long day of drudgery will collapse on the couch and want to take their mind off life’s worst entanglements with a few hours of gaming. These working stiffs necessarily have to reach for the now more expensive first-party controller first if they don’t want to get up and hit the Switch 2 power button. All but a paltry few third-party devices can remotely wake the console from sleep. Peripheral maker Gulikit is currently the only third-party brand w

'Kirby Air Riders' Is Coming to Switch 2 and It’s ‘Basically Like Mario Kart'

More than two decades after Kirby Air Ride launched on GameCube, Kirby Air Riders is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 on Nov 20. Director Masahiro Sakurai announced the news in a Nintendo Direct that aired today, alongside a detailed look at the upcoming racing game. “It basically is like Mario Kart,” Sakurai says. The sequel is also the first Kirby title to be directed by fan favorite Sakurai since the original. “Oh dear,” Sakurai said during the Direct. “Why is making a game so hard?” Air Riders

Kirby Air Riders glides onto the Switch 2 in November

is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The Switch 2 exclusive list is getting longer with the racing game Kirby Air Riders coming to the console on November 20th. Today, Nintendo offered a luxurious 45 minutes devoted to its cutest pink blob who, when you think about it, is r

CPG startup Keychain snags $30M to build in India, grow in the U.S.

Keychain, a U.S. startup that helps consumer brands find manufacturing partners, has raised $30 million in fresh funding as it looks to scale its India-based development team to drive growth in North America. While headquartered in New York, Keychain operates as a distributed company with its core engineering and product development centered in India. The startup is doubling down on this model with the new funding, aiming to grow its engineering, product design, and analytics teams in Gurugram

Nebraska man gets 1 year in prison for $3.5M cryptojacking scheme

A Nebraska man was sentenced to one year in prison for defrauding cloud computing providers of over $3.5 million to mine cryptocurrency worth nearly $1 million. Charles O. Parks III (also known as "CP3O") was arrested and charged in April with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions. He was facing up to 20 years in prison in December after admitting that he didn't pay a $3.5 million bill after renting cloud computing time from two providers for his cryptojac

PlayStation Plus Subscribers Can Play Marvel's Spider-Man and More Now

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can, and PlayStation Plus subscribers can now become the famous web-slinger in Marvel's Spider-Man. PlayStation Plus is Sony's version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers -- Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) -- and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access t