Technologies

Uber Revs Up New Discounts With Prepaid Ride Passes, Uber Eats Meal Deals

Eat and ride cheaper with prepaid and price lock passes, including for teens, and with lunches priced at $15 or less.

Alas, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are over. Autumn is here, and many of us are back to our routines — commuting to work and school and a lot more lunches in the office and the cafeteria.

Uber and Uber Eats are introducing several new features to take some of the economic sting out of all that eating and riding, including meal deals, prepaid passes and price-locked rides.

«As fall routines take shape, daily life shouldn’t feel like a daily battle,» said Amit Fulay, head of rider product at Uber. «With these new features, we’re making it simpler and more affordable to move through your day — whether that’s to the office, grabbing a meal, or getting your teen to practice.»

Meal deals at $15 or less

US workers are back in the office at the highest rate since before the COVID pandemic — nearly 80%, according to market research from Placer.ai — and they’re as hungry as ever. According to a 2023 survey by ezCater, an online marketplace that connects businesses to restaurants and caterers, workers in big cities spend a bunch for lunch per month, including Los Angeles ($432), New York ($418) and San Francisco ($416).

Uber Eats is rolling out Meal Deals, which will provide popular meals for $15 or less, including all fees. How it works: Participating restaurants will prepare popular lunches and dinners in batches, which will drive the prices down because of the volume. Orders might take a few minutes longer than usual, the company said, since deliveries will also occur in batches.

Meal Deals will be available first in New York City, Austin and Miami, and then Philadelphia shortly thereafter. Uber Eats plans to expand the program to more cities in the near future.

Prepaid passes on rides

Uber is offering discounts on rides you take frequently with Prepaid Passes. Customers can buy bundles of 5, 10, 15 or 20 rides. The bigger the bundle, the bigger the savings — up to 20%.

Prepaid passes will be available in more than 75 US cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami,Orlando, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, St. Louis and Tampa Bay. Uber said it will be adding more cities soon.

Wider reach for price lock passes

Uber rolled out this feature in a few cities in the US in May, and now it’s expanding to every major city, and also major cities in Brazil.

Riders can lock in a price from point A to point B for a 1-hour window each day on their selected routes with a pass that costs $3. The pass is good for 30 days or $50 in savings, whichever comes first. Riders can buy up to 10 passes at a time.

Uber says that if your locked-in price is higher than the upfront price at the time you take the ride, you will get the lower price.

Ride passes for teens

From their accounts, teen customers can buy price-lock passes or prepaid passes. They can use a personal payment method or a card connected to the family profile.

That could come in handy for busy teens going to and from many places, including school, sports and social events.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, Sept. 24

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Sept. 24.

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? Hint: There are a lot of S words in it today. I couldn’t figure out what the editors wanted for 5-Across and 8-Across, so I solved the other clues and those answers filled in. Need some answers? Read on. 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: Pond gunk
Answer: SCUM

5A clue: With 8-Across, like an unlimited buffet
Answer: ALLYOU

8A clue: See 5-Across
Answer: CANEAT

9A clue: Opponent of Athens in the Peloponnesian War
Answer: SPARTA

10A clue: «Keep it down!»
Answer: SHH

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Outs that advance the runner, in baseball lingo
Answer: SACS

2D clue: Put your hands together
Answer: CLAP

3D clue: Bone on the same side of the arm as the pinky
Answer: ULNA

4D clue: Mike who voiced Shrek
Answer: MYERS

6D clue: Hippocratic ___ (doctor’s pledge)
Answer: OATH

7D clue: State with license plates that read «Greatest Snow on Earth»
Answer: UTAH

Technologies

NASA Is Sending Astronauts to Circle the Moon in February 2026: What to Know

The astronauts won’t be landing or picking up moon rocks during their 10-day mission.

It’s been more than 50 years since astronauts last went to the moon, and yet few NASA missions stir the kind of excitement that the Apollo program once did. But now, NASA has new moon plans. The upcoming Artemis II mission, scheduled for February, will be the closest humanity has come to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. And it’ll be setting the stage for another moon landing.

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

On Tuesday, NASA announced details of the upcoming mission, which will send four astronauts around the moon and back again.

Artemis II: The Plan

The Artemis II launch window opens Feb. 5, 2026, and lasts up to eight days. That means the mission will launch on Feb. 5 at the earliest and Feb. 13 at the latest.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will crew Artemis II. Wiseman, Glover and Koch are all Americans, and Hansen will be the first Canadian ever to travel to the moon.

NASA will use the same systems it did during the uncrewed Artemis I flight test in 2022. The launch will use NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which was developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance.

After launch, the Orion spacecraft will perform a series of maneuvers to raise its orbit around Earth. NASA says that Orion will be 46,000 miles away from Earth during this time. For reference, the International Space Station orbits at around 250 miles above our planet.

Orion will orbit Earth twice before separating from the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket. From there, manual controls will be engaged and the crew will be on its way to the moon. After a few days, the crew will overshoot the moon by about 4,700 miles, giving the crew a rare glimpse of the Earth and the moon at the same time, with the moon in the foreground.

After the overshoot, the crew will begin its return home. NASA refers to this as a free ride, as the crew essentially just has to wait for gravity to pull Orion back to Earth. The trip will take 10 days in total.

We’ll have to wait until 2027 for a moon landing

By the time the Artemis II crew circles the moon, it will have been 54 years since NASA’s final Apollo mission sent astronauts to the moon in December 1972.

During that 12-day mission, the Apollo 17 crew landed on the moon, collected space rocks and investigated potential volcanic activity. The mission was famous for being the first to include a civilian scientist, geologist Harrison Schmitt.

The Artemis II crew will come closer to the moon than any human has since the Apollo 17 mission, but they won’t land on the moon’s surface. Instead, they will fly around it.

The Artemis II mission serves as a test flight to see how well the Space Launch System rocket and Orion perform. The mission will also test and observe the spacecraft to ensure it works as expected. Think of Artemis II as a dress rehearsal for a follow-up mission, Artemis III, which will include a crewed moon landing.

Artemis III is planned for 2027. If it stays on schedule, it will be the mission that puts humans back on the moon for the first time in 55 years. The crew plans to touch down in one of 13 planned landing sites, including the previously untouched south pole of the moon.

Technologies

Keep an Eye Out for a Newly Discovered Comet in October

You might not even need binoculars to see this comet, named SWAN25B.

No tricks, but skywatchers may be in for an October treat when a newly discovered comet passes through our skies. Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) — or SWAN25B for short — looks to be heading our way.

The comet — named after the science instrument aboard the SOHO space observatory, which observes the sun — was first spotted on Sept. 11 by Ukrainian amateur astronomer Vladimir Bezugly, while studying images captured by SWAN.

«This is a milestone, the 20th official SWAN comet so far,» Bezugly told Universe Today.

Read more: 7 Stargazing Apps for Spotting Constellations and More

Bezugly made the discovery one day before the comet reached its closest point to the sun, which is known as perihelion.

«It was an easy comet for detection due to sufficient brightness in the (ultraviolet) band and location in the SWAN images, exactly in its center,» Bezugly told Universe Today. «But it was difficult due to the very close location to the sun and angular motion, which is very close to the sun’s motion in SWAN images.»

On Sept. 17, an observatory in Chile snapped a photograph using a telescope, showing SWAN25B with a bright coma and striking emerald ion tail. A coma is an atmosphere that forms around a comet as it nears the sun. The sun’s heat causes the frozen gases and icy chunks in the comet’s nucleus to change and create an atmosphere.

«With its orbit still poorly constrained due to a very short observational arc, this comet has quickly become a fascinating target to follow in the coming weeks,» the team in Chile said.

What exactly is a comet?

NASA calls comets «cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the sun,» noting that «when frozen, they are the size of a small town.»

Their most famous comet feature is probably the tail. When comets come near the sun, they heat up and spew dust and gases, forming the tail, which streams away from the sun. NASA says there are likely billions of comets orbiting our sun.

The most famous comet is Halley’s comet, which appears every 76 years. It was last seen in Earth’s skies in 1986 and will return in 2061.

When should I look for the new comet?

According to LiveScience, the comet should pass closest to Earth around Oct. 19-20, and some astronomers think it could be bright enough to observe without a telescope or binoculars. Look for a faint, fuzzy patch of light. A smartphone app can help you find it.

You can track the position of SWAN25B using TheSkyLive.com, which gives the comet’s distance from the Earth in real time and offers a neat interactive star map. That map lets you enter your location so you can see what the sky looks like from where you live.

It’s much easier to see the comet, or any cosmic features in the night sky, if you head away from city lights and go to a dark area in the country. Try to find a clear night, when the clouds won’t impact visibility. SWAN25B might be bright enough to observe by looking up in the sky.

More skygazing highlights

October is already a busy month for skywatchers.

A supermoon will hang in the night sky bigger and brighter than usual during its perigee, and a great time to head outside to see it is Oct. 6, when there’s a full moon. The October supermoon will be the first of four consecutive supermoons, which we can expect every month through January of next year.

If you’re looking for help to guide your skywatching this October, head to our list of Best Stargazing Apps.