NYT Connections hints and answers for Thursday, March 12 (game #1005)

Looking for a different day?

A new NYT Connections puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing 'today's game' while others are playing 'yesterday's'. If you're looking for Wednesday's puzzle instead then click here: NYT Connections hints and answers for Wednesday, March 11 (game #1004).

Good morning! Let's play Connections, the NYT's clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you've finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I've also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc's Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Connections today is below, so don't read on if you don't want to know the answers.

NYT Connections today (game #1005) - today's words

(Image credit: New York Times)

Today's NYT Connections words are…

• CUCKOO CLOCK
• SWING
• STEP
• SANDBOX
• HOURGLASS
• MEXICAN FLAG
• METRONOME 
• WEATHER VANE
• WINDSHIELD WIPER
• BUNKER
• SPIN
• PENDULUM
• DESERT
• REFORMER
• FROOT LOOPS
• BARRE

NYT Connections today (game #1005) - hint #1 - group hints

What are some clues for today's NYT Connections groups?

• YELLOW: Granular containment
• GREEN: Side to side movement
• BLUE: Assisted gym activity
• PURPLE: Feathered friends

Need more clues?

We're firmly in spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today's NYT Connections puzzles…

NYT Connections today (game #1005) - hint #2 - group answers

What are the answers for today's NYT Connections groups?

• YELLOW: PLACES TO FIND SAND
• GREEN: THINGS THAT MOVE BACK AND FORTH
• BLUE: APPARATUS-BASED EXERCISE CLASSES
• PURPLE: FEATURING BIRDS

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM.

NYT Connections today (game #1005) - the answers

(Image credit: New York Times)

The answers to today's Connections, game #1005, are…

• YELLOW: PLACES TO FIND SAND BUNKER, DESERT, HOURGLASS, SANDBOX
• GREEN: THINGS THAT MOVE BACK AND FORTH METRONOME, PENDULUM, SWING, WINDSHIELD WIPER
• BLUE: APPARATUS-BASED EXERCISE CLASSES BARRE, REFORMER, SPIN, STEP
• PURPLE: FEATURING BIRDS CUCKOO CLOCK, FROOT LOOPS, MEXICAN FLAG, WEATHER VANE

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• My rating: Easy
• My score: Perfect

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Kudos to anyone that got today’s hardest/purple category — a group that required knowledge of breakfast cereals, flags and instruments to measure wind direction. 

WEATHER VANE made it on to the  FEATURING BIRDS list because they invariably include a cockerel, but not always — they can also feature dolphins and dragons. The world’s largest weather vane has a ship perched on top.

Meanwhile, I hesitated over APPARATUS-BASED EXERCISE CLASSES. I knew SPIN, which requires a stationary bicycle, and STEP, which requires a stationary step, while REFORMER refers to various pieces of Pilates equipment resembling medieval torture devices. BARRE I had not heard of, though — I’ve since discovered it requires a bar.

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Yesterday's NYT Connections answers (Wednesday, March 11, game #1004)

• YELLOW: STEAL LIFT, PALM, PINCH, POCKET
• GREEN: MAKE NICER, WITH "UP" DRESS, JAZZ, SPIFF, SPRUCE
• BLUE: KINDS OF CONES ICE CREAM, PINE, SNOW, TRAFFIC
• PURPLE: PRONOUN HOMOPHONES HEE, MI, OUI, YEW

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What is NYT Connections?

NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.

On the plus side, you don't technically need to solve the final one, as you'll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What's more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.

It's a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.

It's playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.

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'We can’t wait for players to experience this level of detail in The Witcher 4' — how CD Projekt Red and Nvidia are teaming up to transform the future of PC gaming

Nvidia’s GDC event has been showcasing some pretty cool stuff coming to future games, and one of the announcements that's got me the most excited is that Nvidia is teaming up with CD Projekt Red to bring its RTX Mega Geometry foliage tech to The Witcher 4.

Now, there’s no denying that ‘Mega Geometry foliage’ is an awesome name, but the ambition behind it is even more exciting: more believable trees, forests and environments.

As Nvidia explains in a blog post, RTX Mega Geometry foliage introduces a “new level-of-detail system for foliage", thanks to technology that "selectively updates scenes, reducing memory usage and accelerating performance in a visually seamless manner.”

Essentially, it means that advanced path-tracing lighting effects — which take a big toll on the hardware — can be implemented in complex clusters of plants and trees, adding realistic animations, lighting and shadows.

This can make a huge difference to how realistic and immersive a game feels. Real forests are living, growing, things, and static recreations in games can feel lifeless and fake in comparison. However, individually animating every leaf on every branch of a single tree, let alone an entire forest, would have once been far too difficult for gaming hardware to handle.

Add in lighting and shadows that react to every tree, as well as the position of light sources, like the Sun, and you end up with an implementation that is incredibly hardware-intensive. That's why most games offer much more basic representations of forests — at a cost of realism.

Nvidia introduced Mega Geometry last year. The technology combines path-traced lighting with detailed geometric shapes (such as raised patterns on environmental objects, like statues), while lowering the hardware demands by collecting the shapes and objects in clusters. This then allows for large-scale environments that benefit from stunning details and lighting effects.

With RTX Mega Geometry foliage, this tech is now being used for large-scale natural scenes, especially forests, so they can make use of real-time path-traced lighting.

Nvidia has released an in-depth video that goes more into the tech that makes this possible.

According to the video, RTX Mega Geometry foliage "selectively updates scenes, reducing memory usage and accelerating performance in a visually-seamless manner". This allows dense forests with ‘millions’ of trees and plants to have “unique animation, and accurate real-time lighting and shadows.”

Improving detail and graphical effects whilst lowering hardware requirements sounds a bit too good to be true, but I’ve been impressed with Nvidia’s DLSS and Frame Generation features in the past. These have leveraged AI to lower the hardware burden of graphically-intensive games, while keeping image quality close to the same, or sometimes even improved. So I have high hopes for this tech.

Toss A Coin To Your Witcher (and Nvidia)

Despite still being early days, the examples shown in the video are impressive. Plus, the announcement that Nvidia is making the tech open-source later this year should hopefully mean we’ll get a decent amount of new games coming out that support the technology.

One of those games will be (as announced at GDC) The Witcher 4 – one of the games I am most excited about playing in the future. Cezary Bella, Rendering Engineer, CD Projekt Red, mentions that the developers are working with Nvidia to bring path tracing to The Witcher 4, and by using RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology, fully path-traced forests will also be in the game.

The Witcher series of games are set in a world loosely based on eastern Europe, and that means lots of lush forests. The Witcher 3 wasn’t just one of my favorite games of all time, it was a graphical showcase, so I’m ridiculously excited to see what the next game looks like.

It also means that PC will easily be the platform to play The Witcher 4. While Nvidia will be making the RTX Mega Geometry foliage tech open-source, it’s very likely that you’ll need an Nvidia GPU to take advantage of it, and both the Xbox and PS5 use AMD hardware.

Of course, the fact that the PC version will likely be a (bit) cheaper, hopefully support mods, and will be playable on my gaming handheld as well as my desktop PC (plus the small matter of me not owning any current consoles), means that I was always going to be playing The Witcher 4 on my PC anyway. I just hope RAM and GPU prices drop even a little bit before it releases sometime next year.

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This bizarre indie game challenges you to ‘rizz’ monster girls in a fantasy dungeon

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• Indie game Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart has a free demo out now
• It's a cute game that's all about flirting with fantasy creatures
• It will be released in full later this year

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Upcoming indie release Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart just got a free Steam demo as part of the ongoing WINGS Women's Day Sale.The game, which hails from Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion developer Snoozy Kazoo, is all about flirting your way through retro-style fantasy dungeons.You play as Taffy, the hopeless ex of a powerful dragon demon lord who sets out on a long-winded quest to win her back with rare gifts scavenged from a monster-filled dungeon. Unfortunately, you have next to no combat ability, but tactical flirting soon proves enough to win the day.The game's turn-based "combat" system challenges you to carefully time blown kisses as you charge a courage meter that unlocks the option to trigger a powerful 'rizz' move. This has you choose from an assortment of pick-up lines, with the most effective wooing the monster into joining your party.

From then on, they can fight on your behalf; it's almost like Pokémon, but with all the thirstiness of a particularly racy Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough and plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Each monster has one of four distinct personality types, with a dynamic interaction system that requires you to give each the right amount of attention in order to avoid arguments.I've been having a good time with the demo so far (I particularly like the super cute pixel art of each character sprite, not to mention the constant stream of very Gen Z jokes), and the full game promises access to more than a dozen types of monster including werewolves, goblins, unicorns, and much more. That's on top of five unique dungeons to explore and bonding activities like visits to inns and sleepovers. The Steam store page clarifies that "this is a short game made by a small team" in animated giant bright right fiery font, so I'm not expecting this to be the longest game out there, but I'm still eager to play more when it releases later this year.

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Google will stop at nothing to get you to sign up to YouTube Premium — and its unskippable 30-second ads could be the final straw

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• Google has rolled out 30-second unskippable ads for YouTube's TV app
• It's another way for the company to convince more people to sign up to YouTube Premium
• Last year YouTube made more ad revenue than any of the biggest media companies

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Google will stop at nothing to make you cave and succumb yourself to a YouTube Premium subscription, and its latest move could be the one thing that makes you throw in the towel — it’s now targeting YouTube’s TV app. The company unveiled that VRC non-skip ads are now being rolled out to the TV version of the YouTube app globally, removing the option to skip ads after just a few seconds. Just like its ad-blocker and background play crackdowns for phones and laptops, Google is implementing similar measures for YouTube for TV, and it’s all because of shifting viewing habits. As more users opt for their TVs over smartphones and other devices for YouTube viewing, it gives Google a target, allowing the company to really show you what YouTube Premium features you’re missing out on. But from Google's announcement, it appears that its new ads system is also designed to mimic the feel of watching traditional broadcast television. The company details that “Google AI dynamically optimizes between 6-second Bumpers, 15-second standard and 30-second CTV-only non-skippable ad formats, ensuring your campaign reaches the right audience at the right time”, meaning that Google AI will wait to show you ads during the moments when you’re most engaged with whatever video content you’re watching. But there’s more to the strategy than meets the eye.

Business Insider reveals that YouTube made $40.4 billion in advertising revenue last year (Image credit: Business Insider)

In 2025, YouTube made over $60 billion in revenue, $40 billion of that being from advertising. According to Business Insider ($/£), this equates more to the combined advertising revenue of Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Skydance, and Warner Bros. Discovery. So it’s official; YouTube is the biggest media company out there, so of course Google is taking the opportunity to generate more revenue growth from YouTube’s TV experience now that more viewers use it in a living room just as they would with the best streaming services — and I’m one of those people.

Signing up to YouTube Premium’s free trial is the best thing I’ve done

As it stands, Google has locked the most minor features into YouTube Premium which has made its free version almost unbearable to use. I’ll hold my hands up when I say I caved to the temptation of a YouTube Premium free trial and, I hate to admit it, but it’s frustratingly good. Aside from the complete absence of ads, smaller features such as background play, continue watching, and video and audio quality makes all the difference — and it’s even better if you’re a big music buff. Though I’m a Spotify subscriber, for me its music video integration is nowhere near YouTube’s level, and the same goes for live recorded performances, both of which I always go back to YouTube for. That said, if you’re tempted to make the most of YouTube’s music video and live shows content, then you’ll have to go whole hog with YouTube Premium as the more affordable YouTube Premium Lite just won’t cut it. Recently YouTube added background play and downloads to its cheaper plan, but once again left out the music benefits, which includes access to the YouTube Music streaming platform and ad-free viewing on music content (i.e. music videos). But if this isn’t a priority for you, Premium Lite should be enough to suffice if all you want is majority ad-free viewing.

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Microsoft's year of fixing Windows 11 is off to a promising start, as latest update improves stability — but it still has a lot more work to do

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• Windows 11's March update is now rolling out
• Microsoft has actioned a whole lot of fixes and reliability improvements
• There are a number of new features, too, but they aren't overly exciting in the main

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Windows 11's latest update is now rolling out, and this is a patch you'll likely want to grab purely for the honing applied to the operating system — even if there aren't any hugely compelling feature additions (for most folks, anyway).Windows Central flagged up a full breakdown of what the March update contains, and Microsoft has confirmed and actioned a whole lot of smoothing over and fixing work here (as previously noted with the February optional update, which was a preview of this full release).For starters, Microsoft now promises 'improved reliability' for when your Windows 11 PC wakes from sleep, and that process should happen faster due to the fine-tuning of display-related elements. This speedup should be particularly noticeable when the system is under heavy load, we're told.There's a good deal of tweaking for File Explorer, which is the app that's responsible for displaying your folders and files therein on the desktop. Microsoft notes: "You can now open a new File Explorer window more reliably. Holding the Shift key and selecting the File Explorer icon on the taskbar, or using the middle mouse button, now opens a new instance of File Explorer instead of the current one."Reliability improvements for File Explorer have been applied in terms of displaying devices across a network in folders, and the search functionality is more reliable when searching across multiple drives (or via 'This PC' which shows all the drives in your system).Microsoft has also added an 'Extract all' command for archived (compressed) folders that aren't ZIPs (which already had this).Moving onto the taskbar, the behavior when apps are 'uncombined' — meaning each instance of an app window appears separately, rather than being stacked under one entry in the bar — has been improved. Specifically, when the taskbar uses its overflow area because there are too many app entries on the bar, it doesn't shift the entire lot of any given app over to this separate spillover panel; only some of the instances (the ones that don't fit) are moved. That makes a lot more sense.Taskbar search functionality has also been tinkered with so you can preview any search result by hovering the mouse over it and selecting 'Preview' (so you don't have to open it). Group headers now show the number of results, too, and on top of this, Microsoft has changed the icon for when searching in Task Manager to show the traditional magnifying glass.The March update has also introduced improved levels of 'visual consistency' across Windows 11. This includes a better experience for the taskbar when the auto-hide feature is enabled, as well as fine-tuning for the print dialog box, and the credential fields in the Windows Security panel.Speaking of security, the login and lock screens have been made more reliable, as has the projection menu in Windows 11, plus Nearby Sharing now has better reliability when sending big files.Finally, the Windows printing service has received some attention to "help printing run more smoothly and reduce slowdowns during high‑volume printing" which sounds very useful. And the settings for the Windows Update panel should behave more responsively now.

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Analysis: a laudable fixer update, but let's steer clear of the bloat, Microsoft

(Image credit: TechRadar)

That's a long list of tweaking, and it's good to see all this rolling out to the Windows 11 computing public. Collectively it represents some useful work on honing existing features, which is something Microsoft has promised will be a major campaign this year — and we're already seeing the evidence of this. This time around the wake from sleep and printing improvements look particularly handy, as does all the work on File Explorer and the taskbar.There are quite a few feature introductions with the March update, too, but I'm not feeling particularly excited about them, as for many users, they won't have much of an impact, if any.Quite a few of the changes are for business only, and others are rather humdrum, although there are some interesting additions here if you use emoji, as there are new offerings in the emoji picker, or the widgets board — a revamped interface is rolling out with some great customization options, so that's a major bonus for widget fans.While a new internet speed test in the taskbar sounds good, I wrote yesterday about how this is a disappointment, and very much a missed opportunity for Microsoft. On top of that, a new option that's present in the account menu section of the Start menu, which ferries you to a 'benefits' page, is essentially just some gratuitous promotion for the Microsoft account, in the same way that the speed test promotes Bing. We could certainly do with less of this kind of bloat, and more of the fixing and honing seen above in the March update, Microsoft.

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PC makers are in ‘shock’ over the MacBook Neo and are ‘seriously discussing’ how to compete — and that could benefit everyone

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• The MacBook Neo is a ‘shock’ to the PC industry, Asus says
• Apple’s rivals are now ‘seriously discussing’ how to compete
• That response could be complicated by rising global memory costs

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For a long time, Apple has refrained from competing at the more affordable end of the computing market, which may have led to a degree of complacency among rivals. That complacency has now been shattered with the launch of the MacBook Neo, and an Asus executive has neatly summed up the industry’s reaction to what is now one of the best budget laptops money can buy. Speaking on an earnings call on March 10 (transcribed via Seeking Alpha), Asus’s Chief Financial Officer Nick Wu said Apple’s rivals are going to have to adapt quickly to the new situation — and with the ongoing memory shortage making RAM prices incredibly expensive for PC makers, that might not be easy. On the call, Wu noted that: “given Apple’s historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market.” Wu’s comments were translated from Chinese by an interpreter. Wu doesn’t think existing PC makers are sitting still after the launch of the MacBook Neo, adding: “I believe all PC vendors, including upstream vendors like Microsoft, Intel and AMD, they’re all taking this very seriously, seriously discussing how to compete with this product in the entire PC ecosystem. So I think there are a lot of ongoing discussions about how we can — or how they can compete with the Neo.”

Working out how to compete

(Image credit: Future)

Competing with the MacBook Neo is clearly new territory for companies like Asus, because this isn’t just any old company we’re talking about — it’s Apple, one of the most powerful tech firms on the planet, with deep resources that enable it to develop and market competitive products. Wu felt that the MacBook Neo has a weakness, in that it only comes with 8GB of memory that can’t be upgraded, and that “this may limit certain applications.” That’s true to a degree — in our MacBook Neo review, our writer found that “while you could fire up Blender and work on complex 3D scenes, the Neo is going to struggle.”That said, Apple’s RAM uses a unified memory architecture with a shared memory pool, which in layman’s terms means it’s snappier than regular PC RAM. Indeed, our review concluded that “Overall, the performance of the MacBook Neo is very impressive for the price.” Eventually, Wu believes that “the entire PC system will launch corresponding products to compete with Apple.” And that certainly makes sense — Apple’s ability to bring premium-feeling quality to a budget device like the MacBook Neo means its rivals need to up their game. The old low-price PC laptops, with their flimsy plastic cases and sub-par performance, won’t cut it anymore. The ongoing RAM crisis could hamper their ability to compete, though. On the earnings call, Wu made the point that “memory prices have risen over 100% from quarter 4 last year to quarter 1 this year.” Once Asus’s existing stock is used up, “we will definitely need to adjust end product prices to some extent to reflect that change,” Wu said. If affordable laptops are no longer especially affordable due to rising memory costs, that could work to Apple’s advantage. Given Apple’s massive purchasing power, it’s able to command lower RAM prices from its suppliers than some of its competitors, somewhat insulating it from the component chaos. As Wu’s comments have made clear, Apple’s entry into the budget end of the PC market has sent its rivals scrambling. If PC makers are moved to improve their offerings in order to compete with Apple, that will benefit consumers everywhere, regardless of whether they prefer Windows or macOS.

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Can it play Doom? This biocomputer built on human brain cells just learned to shoot demons, but not everyone's convinced

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• The CL1 'biological computer' has been shown playing Doom
• This is essentially 200,000 human neurons plopped on a microchip
• This brain soup has apparently learned to find and shoot enemies in the game, although skeptics are arguing about the definition of 'playing' here

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Living human brain cells are capable of playing Doom, and by that, I mean a bunch of cells not inside a brain (of course, that wouldn't be much of a revelation), but in a lab — though there's still some debate about what the definition of actually 'playing' a game is here.As posted on Reddit, this is the work of Cortical Labs, a firm that used a "multi-electrode array" to achieve this feat, which is essentially 200,000 human neurons plopped on a microchip.This is otherwise known as the CL1 'biological computer', which is a "high-performance closed-loop system where real neurons interact with software in real time". In this case, Cortical Labs worked with an independent researcher called Sean Cole to get the CL1 running Doom — or rather, playing Doom. Well, sort of, and therein lies some of the controversy.These brain cells aren't playing the game via some sort of controller, but rather, they are very directly engaged in navigating Doom's maps and dealing with its grumpy demonic inhabitants.What happens is that the video feed of the game is directly mapped to the neurons using patterns of electrical stimulation. As Cortical Labs explains in the YouTube video below, demonstrating this, when a monster appears on the left side of the screen, certain electrodes stimulate the left side of the sensory area of the neuron soup in the CL1. The neurons then react to the stimulation, and that cell activity is interpreted as motor commands, meaning controlling the Doom guy (moving and shooting).Four years ago, Cortical Labs ran a similar experiment with Pong, although Doom is obviously a lot more complicated.

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Analysis: learning skills

While this is fascinating, it's also a very abstract way of playing Doom. Theoretically, the brain cells are learning to play the game, albeit using a very direct interface as noted.As Cortical Labs explains in the video, the CL1 is capable of finding enemies and shooting them in Doom, or spinning around if getting hit from behind — but it plays the game badly. If you watch the footage, there's quite a lot of bumbling around and shooting at walls. As Cortical Labs puts it: "The cells play a lot like a beginner who's never seen a computer," adding, "and in all fairness, they haven't."That makes it all look pretty random, which is why some of the detractors on Reddit aren't so impressed with the demo, essentially saying that we have no proof that the neural soup is actually honing its skills, or gaining an 'understanding' of some sort about the game. Sure, it's reacting, they argue — but is it actually reacting, or learning, in any meaningful way? Or is it just waving a pistol around, blasting here and there, and getting lucky some of the time?Still, whatever arguments there are about intent here, or what's actually happening under the surface of the neural soup, Cortical Labs concedes that, as far as Doom goes, the learning skills of the brain cells need to be improved, but it's confident this can be done.For now, this is an eye-opening demo (albeit not the only one of its kind) — certainly more so than the Pong effort — and we shall see where Cortical Labs takes it from here.As we saw last year, the company's grand vision is to allow cloud access to its CL1 biological computers. You can rent a CL1 for $300 per week via Cortical Labs' wetware-as-a-service offering, or buy one for $35,000.

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Can it play Doom? This biocomputer built on human brain cells just learned to shoot demons, but not everyone's convinced

---

• The CL1 'biological computer' has been shown playing Doom
• This is essentially 200,000 human neurons plopped on a microchip
• This brain soup has apparently learned to find and shoot enemies in the game, although skeptics are arguing about the definition of 'playing' here

---

Living human brain cells are capable of playing Doom, and by that, I mean a bunch of cells not inside a brain (of course, that wouldn't be much of a revelation), but in a lab — though there's still some debate about what the definition of actually 'playing' a game is here.As posted on Reddit, this is the work of Cortical Labs, a firm that used a "multi-electrode array" to achieve this feat, which is essentially 200,000 human neurons plopped on a microchip.This is otherwise known as the CL1 'biological computer', which is a "high-performance closed-loop system where real neurons interact with software in real time". In this case, Cortical Labs worked with an independent researcher called Sean Cole to get the CL1 running Doom — or rather, playing Doom. Well, sort of, and therein lies some of the controversy.These brain cells aren't playing the game via some sort of controller, but rather, they are very directly engaged in navigating Doom's maps and dealing with its grumpy demonic inhabitants.What happens is that the video feed of the game is directly mapped to the neurons using patterns of electrical stimulation. As Cortical Labs explains in the YouTube video below, demonstrating this, when a monster appears on the left side of the screen, certain electrodes stimulate the left side of the sensory area of the neuron soup in the CL1. The neurons then react to the stimulation, and that cell activity is interpreted as motor commands, meaning controlling the Doom guy (moving and shooting).Four years ago, Cortical Labs ran a similar experiment with Pong, although Doom is obviously a lot more complicated.

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Analysis: learning skills

While this is fascinating, it's also a very abstract way of playing Doom. Theoretically, the brain cells are learning to play the game, albeit using a very direct interface as noted.As Cortical Labs explains in the video, the CL1 is capable of finding enemies and shooting them in Doom, or spinning around if getting hit from behind — but it plays the game badly. If you watch the footage, there's quite a lot of bumbling around and shooting at walls. As Cortical Labs puts it: "The cells play a lot like a beginner who's never seen a computer," adding, "and in all fairness, they haven't."That makes it all look pretty random, which is why some of the detractors on Reddit aren't so impressed with the demo, essentially saying that we have no proof that the neural soup is actually honing its skills, or gaining an 'understanding' of some sort about the game. Sure, it's reacting, they argue — but is it actually reacting, or learning, in any meaningful way? Or is it just waving a pistol around, blasting here and there, and getting lucky some of the time?Still, whatever arguments there are about intent here, or what's actually happening under the surface of the neural soup, Cortical Labs concedes that, as far as Doom goes, the learning skills of the brain cells need to be improved, but it's confident this can be done.For now, this is an eye-opening demo (albeit not the only one of its kind) — certainly more so than the Pong effort — and we shall see where Cortical Labs takes it from here.As we saw last year, the company's grand vision is to allow cloud access to its CL1 biological computers. You can rent a CL1 for $300 per week via Cortical Labs' wetware-as-a-service offering, or buy one for $35,000.

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Nintendo is demanding a refund for tariffs it paid in the US, but don't expect to see the refund passed on to you

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• Nintendo has demanded a refund and interest for the tariffs it paid
• It's unclear if or when it will be able to get a refund...
• ... though it's unlikely you'll see any kind of refund for tech you bought

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Following the US Supreme Court striking down the Trump administration’s “reciprocal tariffs” introduced on so-called "Liberation Day," companies have already started to sue the government to get a refund on what they paid. That includes Nintendo, which is demanding, via its lawyers, its share of the “more than $200 billion in tariffs on imports from nearly all countries” the US collected (via Aftermath).

Nintendo’s not just asking for a full refund, either; it's demanding interest, too.

This makes it one of over 2,000 similar lawsuits, according to one law firm — a volume which perhaps explains the Customs and Border Protection agency’s request for a 45-day period to set up a refund system, with a judge offering it some breathing room in response (via The Hill).

It doesn’t want to take too long, however, as interest is accruing every day, with estimates suggesting that interest adds around $650 million to the amount the US government owes each month.

Unfortunately, when (even if) tariff refunds are issued to companies, it’s unclear whether these refunds would be passed on to us consumers in any way, though we doubt it. It will be difficult to judge exactly when and who tariffs impacted — as some stock sold during the period would already have been in the country — and companies could also simply argue that they didn’t pass increased costs to consumers.

(Image credit: Shutterstock / robtek)

That’s not to say it won’t happen, but beware of potential scams taking advantage of the confusion. If you get an email or call about how Nintendo or another company owes you a refund for the tariffs you paid, make sure to triple-check whether it’s legitimate before you click any links or share any details.

Lower prices incoming? Nope

Never say never, but higher prices will almost certainly remain a trend in 2026.

While Trump’s original tariffs are off, he has already brought 15% global tariffs back, and we’re still seeing the ongoing impacts of the RAM crisis induced by the AI reliance on memory chips.

On top of that, the recently erupted war in Iran has caused oil prices to soar — at the time of writing, we've crossed $100 a barrel. Oil is essential for energy generation, transport, and even some manufacturing processes, so its price has a major impact on the cost of goods. If high prices persist — or oil costs climb higher — expect tech to see some cost rises too.

Hopefully, we’ll see tech prices drop at some point, but don’t expect that to happen soon. If you’re feeling the squeeze, our TechRadar advice is always to try to squeeze as much out of your existing gadgets for as long as possible — delay that phone refresh a few months to a year to maximise value — and if you do need, or just want, to upgrade your gadgets try to shop during a sale like Black Friday or one of Amazon’s many Prime Day variants.

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Apple’s latest MacBook Pro surges ahead for battery life — but with one disappointing surprise

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• We tested Apple’s latest M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros for battery life
• While one device scored extremely well, the other fell a little behind
• We’ve compared the results from our past reviews, with interesting results

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Apple prides itself on the extensive battery life of its best MacBooks, and they’ve been going from strength to strength ever since the company switched to its own Apple silicon chips. With the recent release of new MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, we thought we’d put the devices through their paces to see how well their batteries held up — and the results contain a few interesting surprises.

According to benchmark data gathered by our own labs (below) – which is all focused around web browsing longevity – the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro chip is the best-performing Apple laptop for battery life that we’ve reviewed in the M3, M4 and M5 generations. That includes any size and any chip tier (such as M3 Pro or M5 Max).

Its average battery life score of 21 hours, 10 minutes and 16 seconds easily exceeds Apple’s estimation of 14 hours of web browsing and pulls ahead of last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro chip, which clocked in at 20 hours, 46 minutes and 29 seconds. That’s great news for anyone who is looking at the new MacBook Pro laptops and considers battery life to be a key feature in their buying decision.

The size of the laptop on test undoubtedly will have had an effect — simply put, a 16-inch MacBook Pro has more internal space for larger batteries compared to a 14-inch equivalent. If battery life is a priority, a larger laptop will generally be a better option for you.

Model	Battery test (web surfing in hours / mins, Future Labs)	Official battery life (web surfing in hours / mins, Apple)
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5 Max)	17:58	13:00
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (M5 Pro)	21:10	14:00
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5)	18:00	16:00

Latest isn’t always best

(Image credit: Future)

The improvements seen in the M5 Pro suggest that Apple is making efficiency improvements to its latest chips, as both the M5 Pro and M4 Pro scores were recorded in a 16-inch MacBook Pro. That similarity ensures most of the focus can be placed on the chip rather than the space available for battery cells.

But there were some interesting discrepancies, and the latest chips are not always the most performant, according to our test results. For example, we also benchmarked the M5 Max chip, this time inside a 14-inch MacBook Pro, and its performance was somewhat disappointing.

It achieved an average battery life of 17 hours, 58 minutes and 18 seconds. That’s still ahead of Apple’s web browsing figure of 13 hours, but compared to other 14-inch MacBook Pros with similar battery capacity, the M5 Max fell behind both the M4 and the M5 chips. It did outdo the M3 Pro, however, which scored 17 hours, 23 minutes and nine seconds.

If you’re considering buying a new MacBook Pro, then, it’s well worth researching the battery capabilities of the model you’re looking at. You can read our full thoughts on the new MacBooks in our updated MacBook Pro 14-inch review.

Generally speaking, a larger laptop will get you more juice, and Apple has been making progress in terms of its chips’ efficiency. But as the M5 Max in the 14-inch MacBook Pro suggests, latest doesn’t always mean best.

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Ever wondered what Mario smells like? Old Spice has the answer

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• Old Spice has released a new collection in collaboration with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
• It includes a range of products with scents and packaging inspired by characters from the film
• They're all available now starting at $7.97

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A new Old Spice scent collection inspired by the upcoming The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is out now.

It features products that range all the way from deodorant sticks and body spray to shower companions like 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner and body lotion. They come in five distinct Super Mario-inspired scents, adorned with artwork celebrating the movie.

The scents include Cosmic Quest, Desert Detour, Castle Crush, Brooklyn Bounce, and, in a slightly jarring break from all the alliteration, Space Mischief. I suppose like 'Space Smell' just doesn't sound that appealing...

Cosmic Quest is described as a "clean fragrance" with watery notes and citrus on a woody and musky base. This sounds quite similar to the brand's existing Whitewater scent, which also blends aquatic smells with lime and woody elements. It's branded with an image of Mario flying from space and is presumably some interpretation of how the iconic plumber smells.

Desert Detour, which features Luigi on its art, is apparently "boozy" thanks to its bourbon and black cherry smell, livened up with the addition of orange peel, oak, and vanilla in a manner that sounds almost like the delicious old-fashioned cocktail.

Castle Crush is clearly inspired by the character of Princess Peach, who appears on its packaging, with an abundance of summery fruits including peach, mango, pineapple, and grapefruit. This is on top of light touches of bergamot and jasmine plus amber, coconut, and vanilla for some warmth.

The Yoshi-branded Brooklyn Bounce is another fruity one, with citrus and florals intended to capture all the allure "of a tropical sunrise in full bloom."

Finally, Space Mischief is a more masculine fragrance with a clean watery smell and a bold citrus twist. It has the movie's villain, Bower Junior, on its label.

The whole range is available from US retailers with prices starting at $7.97. Stock is limited and presumably won't be around for long with the movie set to hit theaters on April 1, 2026.

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Asus just released new open earbuds... for gaming?

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• Asus has launched the ROG Cetra Open Wireless gaming earbuds
• They cost $199 / £174.99 and boast an open design
• The brand advertises them as "perfect" for gaming and fitness

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Asus has launched a new pair of gaming earbuds, the ROG Cetra Open Wireless. They're the first open gaming earbuds from a major hardware brand and are billed as "perfect for gaming, music, and active lifestyles."

Open (or open-ear) earbuds are a relatively recent creation that have become increasingly popular in the last few years thanks to popular models from big audio brands like Bose and JBL. They hook around your ears with drivers that sit a few millimetres further away than regular in-ear earbuds, which usually fully seal the ear canal using a silicone tip.

This leaves your ear open, allowing for almost complete situational awareness and massively reducing fatigue. They're very comfortable to wear, and the ability to hear outside sounds like traffic makes them a good pick for outdoor sport and fitness.

(Image credit: Asus)

They're not without some compromises though. The lack of a seal inevitably means that the ability to produce bass takes a massive hit and (although a few models like the Honor Earbuds Open do offer some form of active noise cancellation) the fact they let in so much sound can be a double edged sword if you want an immersive listening experience in a loud environment.

That's why it's so surprising to see a model geared towards gaming, a market where strong noise cancellation is the norm.

A good fit?

(Image credit: Asus)

The Asus ROG Cetra Open Wireless boast 14.2mm diamond-like carbon coated drivers and support for the brand's 2.4GHz ROG SpeedNova technology via an included wireless dongle.

Bluetooth is offered as well, with dual-mode connectivity for seamless platform switching. Each earbud has a physical button on it, which Asus says will keep them fully responsive in the rain or "intense workouts." An included detachable neck strap even helps keep them in place while you're running.

The idea of a product that's geared towards both gaming and fitness is certainly unusual, and there don't actually seem to be that many gaming-specific features here.

Four microphones are built-in for chatting and there's customizable RGB lighting, of course, with an illuminated ROG logo on each bud. New browser-based Gear Link software that allows you to up the bass via a Phantom Bass setting or enable a more immersive sound mode but that seems to be your lot.

With battery life of roughly 16 hours, with an additional 48 hours in the charging case, you do at least get much more listening time than cheap non-gaming alternatives like the Huawei FreeArc.

The $229.99 / £174.99 asking price, right up there with the cost of some of the best wireless gaming headsets and substantially more than most of the best gaming earbuds, is definitely a tall order and I'm curious to see whether the benefits of an open design are enough to convince gamers to splash out.

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Windows 11 is finally getting an easy way to access dark mode — and a fix for those 'flashbangs' that still plague File Explorer

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• Windows 11 is getting a new more convenient way to enable dark mode
• Microsoft is also implementing a fix for some remaining File Explorer bugs — white flashes on the screen — caused by dark mode last year
• That'll hopefully be the end of those 'flashbangs', but all this work is still in testing for now

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Microsoft is ushering in an improvement for dark mode in Windows 11, as well as fixing a bug that has been hanging around for almost half a year involving distracting white flashes that was caused by work on dark mode.

As Windows Latest noticed, a new preview build in the Beta channel for Windows 11 features the following change, as described by Microsoft: "Removed white flash when launching new File Explorer windows or tabs when File Explorer was set to open to This PC. Also removed white flashes when resizing elements of File Explorer."

If you recall, back in November 2025, Microsoft expanded dark mode so it included a bunch of file operation pop-ups (the boxes that appear when copying or moving files, for example, which were previously left jarringly white when in dark mode).

This change went into testing last October, in fact, but when it was rolled out fully to Windows 11 users, it was found to have introduced a nasty bug whereby people were seeing white flashes on the screen when they were interacting with File Explorer in different ways.

That was seriously irritating, and before long, Microsoft fixed many of the circumstances in which these 'flashbangs' (as they were widely dubbed) were occurring. However, the white flashes remained in some parts of File Explorer.

As outlined by Microsoft, those glitches that were still kicking around when resizing some elements of File Explorer, or when having it set to open to 'This PC', have now been cured. That should be the last of the dark mode-related gremlins in the works, with any luck.

Microsoft is also bringing in a useful improvement to enable Windows 11 users to more easily access dark mode. Windows Latest highlighted a post on X from leaker PhantomOfEarth, who spotted a new option to turn on dark mode (or switch it off) in the Quick Settings menu accessed via the taskbar. There's a new dark mode toggle in the Energy Saver panel here, although this is still in testing for now (as is the mentioned fix).

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Analysis: a baffling timescale

(Image credit: TechRadar)

A quick toggle for dark mode is something that should have been introduced before now, ideally, but it's still good to see the feature inbound. Right now, if you want to change between dark and light modes, you need to dive a couple of levels into the Settings app (Settings > Personalization > Colors), which isn't a huge deal, but it's not exactly convenient either.

Mind you, the whole timescale of the overall work with dark mode — in terms of its slow and piecemeal introduction to Windows 11 — has been baffling. Why has it taken so very long to do this? Clearly it's not high on the list of priorities for Windows 11, but even so — the time taken for a basic feature to be universally applied across the OS just seems to have dragged on and on.

On top of that, it's worth noting that it's been five months since the flashbang bug in File Explorer — caused by work on dark mode — first manifested, and it's still an ongoing problem. Granted, this should be the end of the saga now, but this fix is still in testing, so we won't know if it actually works to bring an end to all scenarios where white flashes are still occurring until it rolls out to the general computing public using Windows 11.

Fingers crossed, then, but we've seen Microsoft's fixes introduce new bugs before, so it's far from guaranteed that this will be a full end to the matter.

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