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 tough one. 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: Stats about an athlete.

Green group hint: Where to watch games.

Blue group hint: There used to be a ballpark.

Purple group hint: Names are hidden in these words.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Player bio information.

Green group: Sports streamers.

Blue group: Former MLB ballparks.

Purple group: Ends in a Hall of Fame QB.

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 player bio information. The four answers are alma mater, height, number and position.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is sports streamers. The four answers are Netflix, Paramount, Peacock and Prime.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is former MLB ballparks. The four answers are Ebbets, Kingdome, Three Rivers and Tiger.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ends in a Hall of Fame QB. The four answers are forewarner, Harbaugh, honeymoon and outmanning.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Google on Tuesday announced a significant update to its Android theft-protection arsenal, introducing new tools and settings aimed at making stolen smartphones harder for criminals to access and exploit. The updates, detailed on Google’s official security blog, build on Android’s existing protections and add both stronger defenses and more flexible user controls. 

Smartphones carry your most sensitive data, from banking apps to personal photos, and losing your device to theft can quickly escalate into identity and financial fraud. To counter that threat, Google is layering multiple protective features that work before, during and after a theft.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

At the center of the update is a revamped Failed Authentication Lock. Previously introduced in Android 15, this feature now gets its own toggle in Android 16 settings, letting you decide whether your phone should automatically lock itself after repeated incorrect PIN or biometric attempts. This gives you more control over how aggressively your phone defends against brute-force guessing without weakening security.

Google is also beefing up biometric security across the platform. A feature called Identity Check, originally rolled out in earlier Android versions, has been broadened to apply to all apps and services that use Android’s Biometric Prompt — the pop-up that asks for your fingerprint or face to confirm it’s really you — including third-party banking apps and password managers. This means that even if a thief somehow bypasses your lock screen, they’ll face an additional biometric barrier before accessing sensitive apps.

On the recovery side, Google improved Remote Lock, a tool that allows you to lock a lost or stolen device from a web browser by entering a verified phone number. The company added an optional security challenge to ensure only the legitimate owner can initiate a remote lock, an important safeguard against misuse.

And finally, in a notable regional rollout, Google said it is now enabling both Theft Detection Lock and Remote Lock by default on new Android device activations in Brazil, a market where phone theft rates are comparatively high. Theft Detection Lock uses on-device AI to detect sudden movements consistent with a snatch-and-run theft, automatically locking the screen to block immediate access to data.

With stolen phones often used to access bank accounts and personal data, Google says these updates are meant to keep a single theft from turning into a much bigger problem.

An international team of researchers has devised a futuristic tool to examine the footprints left by dinosaurs in our ancient past. The AI-powered app, Dinotracker, can identify dinosaur footprints in moments.

The research comes from a joint project by the Helmholtz-Zentrum research center in Berlin and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the paper on Monday. 

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Identifying a dinosaur species from a footprint isn’t always easy. The footprint is hundreds of millions of years old, often preserved in layers of rock that have shifted over the eons since the track was laid. 

Also, we still have a lot to learn about dinosaurs, and it’s not always clear which species left a footprint. Subjectivity or bias can come into play when identifying them, and scientists don’t always agree with the results.

Gregor Hartmann of Helmholtz-Zentrum, who led the project, told CNET that the research team sought to remove this propensity from the identification process by developing an algorithm that could be neutral. 

«We bring a mathematical, unbiased point of view to the table to assist human experts in interpreting the data,» Hartmann said. 

Researchers trained the algorithm on thousands of real fossil footprints, as well as millions of simulated versions that could recreate «natural distortions such as compression and shifting edges.»

How AI is being used on dinosaur tracks

The system was trained to focus on eight major characteristics of dinosaur footprints, including the width of the toes, the position of the heel, the surface area of the foot that contacted the ground and the weight distribution across the foot. 

The AI tool uses these traits to compare new footprints to existing fossils, and then determines which dinosaur was most likely responsible for the footprint. 

The team tested it against human expert classifications and found that the AI agreed with them 90% of the time.

Hartmann made it clear that the AI system is «unsupervised.» 

«We do not use any labels (like bird, theropod, ornithopod) during training. The network has no idea about it,» Hartmann said. «Only after training, we compare how the network encodes the silhouettes and compare this with the human labels.»

Hartmann said that the hope is for Dinotracker to be used by paleontologists and that the AI tool’s data pool grows as it’s used by more experts.

Bird vs. dinosaur

Using Dinotracker, the researchers have already uncovered some intriguing possibilities on the evolution of birds. When analyzing footprints more than 200 million years old, the AI found strong similarities with the foot structures of extinct and modern birds. 

The team says one possibility is that birds originated tens of millions of years earlier than we thought. But it’s also possible that early dinosaur feet just look remarkably like bird feet.

This evidence, Hartmann notes, isn’t enough to rethink the evolution of birds, since a skeleton is the «true evidence» of earlier bird existence.

«It is essential to keep in mind that over these millions of years, lots of different things can happen to these tracks, starting from the moisture level of the mud where it was created, over the substrate it was created on, up to erosion later,» he said. «All this can heavily change the shape of the fossilized track we find, and ultimately makes it too difficult to interpret footprints, which was the motivation for our study.»

Dinotracker is available for free on GitHub. It’s not in a download-and-use format, so you’ll have to know a bit about software to get it up and running.