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Hints and answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, No. 235, for May 16.

Together, the two retailers will have to wade the choppy waters of new tariffs on imports, including footwear. And they'll face the growing competition from shoe brands selling directly to shoppers.

(Image credit: Scott Olson)

The sleek new smartwatches, aimed at athletes, will ship with the company's brightest screens yet.

This fresh delay adds to concerns that Meta could fall behind other major AI providers like OpenAI and Google.

• SanDisk plans 256TB and 512TB SSDs using new Stargate controller
• Stargate will debut in enterprise drives launching in late 2025
• Company revenue down after WD split but roadmap remains highly ambitious

SanDisk, now operating independently as an SSD and NAND flash manufacturer following its split from Western Digital last year, has teased a new SSD controller called “Stargate,” designed to support extremely high-capacity enterprise drives.

Stargate, which confusingly shares its name with OpenAI’s Stargate project but obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with it, is part of SanDisk’s “Ultra QLC” platform, which aims to scale SSD capacities in the coming years.

During its earnings call, SanDisk CEO David Goeckeler said: “We have a new architecture coming out in the next couple of quarters that we call Stargate, new ASIC, clean sheet design, and then with BiCS 8 QLC… we just think that’s going to be a dynamite project.”

1PB SSD incoming

Goeckeler didn’t share further technical details, but Stargate is expected to debut in enterprise drives such as the DC SN670 series.

That line is scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2025 with 64TB and 128TB capacities, BiCS8 QLC (2Tbit/256GB per die), and PCIe 5.0 support.

Future versions may include PCIe 6.0 as capacity targets rise. SanDisk’s roadmap shows 256TB for 2026, followed by 512TB in 2027, with a 1PB target further out. Stargate is likely to play a central role in enabling those jumps.

The third quarter of SanDisk’s 2025 fiscal year was also its first as a standalone company. It reported $1.695 billion in revenue, a 10 percent decline from the prior quarter, and a $1.881 billion net loss, largely due to a $1.83 billion goodwill impairment.

SanDisk’s strongest segment was client SSDs, bringing in $927 million, followed by $571 million from consumer products and $197 million from the cloud division.

Source: ComputerBase.de

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• Mycelium might power electronics someday, if it stops biodegrading before the job is done
• The split-gill mushroom’s extracellular matrix may be the key to future green batteries
• Scientists dream of compostable batteries, but controlling fungal behavior remains a major challenge

Researchers from Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, are exploring the potential of fungal mycelium to create a compact, biodegradable battery.

Their goal is to use mycelium to produce “fungal paper” for battery electrodes - a concept that, according to researcher Ashutosh Sinha, remains in the experimental phase.

“We want to produce a compact, biodegradable battery whose electrodes consist of a living 'fungal paper,’” Sinha states, emphasizing that this vision is still a dream for now.

The dream of biodegradable batteries

The idea of a biodegradable battery made from living materials is ambitious. The team is working with the mycelium of the split-gill mushroom, a fungus known for its unique mechanical and biological properties.

This fungus is naturally biodegradable and, when combined with its extracellular matrix, produces a material with promising potential for sustainable applications in technology.

The aim is to develop a system that decomposes without releasing harmful waste - unlike conventional electronic devices - by using the natural properties of the material.

Empa researchers are now examining how the tensile strength of mycelium and its sensitivity to moisture can be applied in components like biodegradable sensors and batteries.

Working with living materials brings notable challenges. Mycelium’s biodegradable nature is both an advantage and a limitation.

On one hand, it could significantly reduce the environmental impact of batteries. On the other, its tendency to degrade raises concerns about its longevity and reliability in electronic devices.

Living materials also respond to their environments, making it difficult to predict or control their behavior consistently.

“Biodegradable materials always react to their environment. We want to find applications where this interaction is not a hindrance but maybe even an advantage,” said Empa’s Gustav Nyström.

The idea of a compact, biodegradable battery with fungal paper electrodes remains conceptual, and one of the biggest challenges will be refining the material to meet performance standards required in modern electronics.

Nevertheless, it represents a promising step toward more sustainable and environmentally conscious electronics.

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• A Greek couple thought it would be fun to use ChatGPT as a fortune-teller and have it "read" coffee grounds in their cups
• ChatGPT claimed the husband was cheating with someone whose name starts with E
• The wife is now filing for divorce over the AI tasseography response

A woman in Greece is divorcing her husband after ChatGPT played fortune teller and claimed her husband was cheating on her. According to a Greek City Times report, the couple asked the AI chatbot to look at a photo of the grounds left behind in her husband's cup of Greek coffee and practice tasseography, the ancient art of divining present secrets or future fates based on patterns left behind in tea leaves or coffee.

After looking at the residue at the bottom of their cups, ChatGPT had some shockingly specific things to say. According to the report, the AI claimed to see that the husband was secretly fantasizing about a woman whose name started with an “E” and was fated to begin an affair with her. In case that wasn't enough, ChatGPT's response to the woman’s own cup was to claim that the affair had already started.

Some people take fortune-telling seriously, but usually only from humans practicing divination. But what the husband saw as a quirky, funny moment, his wife saw as a serious and accurate description of reality. She told her husband to leave, announced to her children that she was ending her marriage, and served him with legal papers three days later.

Oracular AI

As a legal matter, it's hard to say how a judge will view this. There's no real precedent for citing a “robot oracle” as evidence of infidelity in a court of law anywhere (though there is one about declaring a house is haunted before you sell it in New York State). But what’s fascinating isn’t the legalities so much as what it says about culture.

Tasseography isn’t some novelty party trick; it's thousands of years old and practiced across coffee and tea-drinking cultures from Turkey to China and beyond. The idea that symbols and swirls in a cup could reveal your fate is a perfect example of how people see stories in randomness, whether a constellation or coffee residue.

That some people want to outsource mystic rituals to AI feels almost predetermined. This reported Greek marital strife is arguably a good reason not to do so, or at least not to call it wisdom. And it's not like ChatGPT actually knows how to read coffee grounds. It wasn’t trained on tasseography. What it can do is make educated guesses based on the patterns it sees in an image and what people have said about similar shapes or symbols on the internet. In other words, making stuff up in a convincing tone, just like a human would.

It turns out that a convincing tone is all it takes for some people. And it's not like this is the first instance. Tarot card reading with ChatGPT was an early demonstration of how flexible the AI could be in its activities. The same goes for making astrology charts and palm reading. But if you stop treating it like entertainment and like a real psychic answer, it can cause real emotional damage.

Then again, if your spouse is willing to believe an AI chatbot claiming psychic powers over your own contradictions, the issue might not be about the technology. So go ahead and ask ChatGPT to read your coffee grounds if you want a laugh. But maybe don't act like you're in a mashup of Black Mirror meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding and run out the door. Sometimes, your coffee is just coffee. And the swirl at the bottom of the cup is not the ghost of a digital Cassandra.

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