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NYT Strands hints, answers for April 5, 2026

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A game being played on a smartphone.

Today's NYT Strands hints are easy if you're an animal lover.

Strands, the New York Times' elevated word-search game, requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky shapes and patterns. Every single letter in the grid will be part of an answer. There's always a theme linking every solution, along with the "spangram," a special, word or phrase that sums up that day's theme, and spans the entire grid horizontally or vertically.

By providing an opaque hint and not providing the word list, Strands creates a brain-teasing game that takes a little longer to play than its other games, like Wordle and Connections.

If you're feeling stuck or just don't have 10 or more minutes to figure out today's puzzle, we've got all the NYT Strands hints for today's puzzle you need to progress at your preferred pace.

NYT Strands hint for today’s theme: Pouch perfect

The words are related to animals.

Today’s NYT Strands theme plainly explained

These words describe pouch-bearing animals.

NYT Strands spangram hint: Is it vertical or horizontal?

Today's NYT Strands spangram is horizontal.

NYT Strands spangram answer today

Today's spangram is Marsupials.

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NYT Strands word list for April 5

  • Wombat

  • Koala

  • Bilby

  • Marsupials

  • Opossum

  • Kangaroo

  • Wallaby

Looking for other daily online games? Mashable's Games page has more hints, and if you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now!

Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Strands.

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Take to the skies with nearly half off the DJI Neo Fly More Combo

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DJI Neo Fly More Combo on pink and light green abstract background

SAVE $90: As of April 22, get the DJI Neo Fly More Combo for $259 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $349 with an on-page coupon. That's a discount of 26%.



DJI Neo Fly More Combo on white background

Credit: Amazon

$259
at Amazon

$349
Save $90

Clip on-page coupon

Whether you're looking to get into flying drones or just want to add another to your collection, DJI is the brand to shop. Despite news of DJI drones being banned in the United States, there are still ways to get around the ban if you look hard enough. You can still keep the drones you own, and you can still shop those on sale at retailers like Amazon. And we've got one that you can snap up right now for an excellent price.

As of April 22, get the DJI Neo Fly More Combo for $259 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $349 with an on-page coupon. That's $90 off and a discount of 26%.

This bundle includes the DJI Neo drone, a remote controller, RC cable, flight battery, two-way charging hub, propeller guards, spare propellers, spare propeller screws, a screwdriver, gimbal protector, and a Type-C to Type-C cable.

The DJI Neo Fly More Combo is a lightweight and simple to fly option for users of any skill level. It's lighter than your phone, in fact, and small enough that you don't need to register with the FAA to fly it. You can use your phone to operate it, and it can take off from your hand with a single button push, so it's already simple to use right out of the box.

You can just fly the drone around, or you can take photos from a bird's eye point of view with smart subject tracking and quickshots that your drone can take all on its own. You can also control it via voice or RC depending on your preference.

With 4K ultra stabilized video, you can also stack plenty of crisp, high definition video while flying, all without complex setups that confuse and potentially frustrate.

if you're ready to get into drone photography or just want a chance to fly one without breaking the bank, this combo is well worth splurging on.

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Google Wallet now lets you track flights from your lock screen. How to try it.

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Google Wallet logo on phone screen

Google just made life a tiny bit easier for Android users who love to travel.

9to5google spotted a new lock screen widget for Android 16 that gives you persistent progress updates on your flights. It's very simple and straightforward: It shows your departing airport, your destination airport, your estimated arrival time, and a progress bar measuring how deep into the flight you are.

As 9to5google noted, this is on top of some already-existing features for travelers who add their boarding passes to the Google Wallet app. Those include push notifications about flight changes, but the flight progress widget is brand-new, having been promised by Google last year.

If you want to try it, well, you'd better have a flight lined up first. Add the boarding pass to Google Wallet, and the widget should appear shortly before takeoff. In other words, you don't really have to do anything other than put your boarding pass in your phone.

This marks another step forward for Google Wallet, which replaced Google Pay in 2024 as the go-to destination for credit cards and other important kinds of digital documentation on Android devices. By all accounts, it's been a successful transition for Android users, and if Google keeps adding neat little conveniences like this flight tracker widget, it'll only get better.

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Meta will track employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training, report says

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Meta is about to ramp up surveillance of its employees, Reuters reports, but in a very 2026 twist, it's not meant to catch people slacking off.

Reuters reports that Meta is installing tracking software that can capture mouse movements and keystrokes on U.S.-based employees' computers. While this sort of surveillance isn't unheard of in corporate America, the motivation here is slightly novel: Meta is reportedly going to use the data to train AI agents, per a company memo seen by Reuters.

This will be done through a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI.

Meta's memo said the idea is to help AI agents improve at tasks they currently struggle with, such as using keyboard shortcuts. And in a different memo reportedly sent to employees on Monday, CTO Andrew Bosworth said to expect more internal data collection in order to make agents better at replicating human work. The goal, per Bosworth, is for agents to do most of the work while humans sit back and monitor the situation.

“The vision we are building towards is ​one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve," Bosworth said, per Reuters.

While Meta did not explicitly say any of this was meant to replace human workers down the line, it's reasonable to wonder if that's where this is eventually going. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of AI last year, and Meta has already laid off a quadruple-digit number of people (though those were unrelated to AI) earlier this year, with more cuts coming later in May.

If, at some point in the future, Meta reduces its workforce with the aim of having AI agents do the work instead, it may have been those same Meta employees who trained the AI in the first place.

In the meantime, Reuters reports that Meta assured employees that the data will not be used in performance reviews.

Meta hasn't had a great year, privacy-wise, and we're only four months into 2026.

In March, the company was accused of sending Meta Ray-Ban user recordings, including intimate images, to offshore Meta workers, also for AI training. Earlier this month, we reported on the case of a former Meta employee under criminal investigation for downloading private Facebook photos. And after a report that Meta was planning to add facial recognition technology into its smart glasses, a group of 70 organizations, including the ACLU, signed a public letter urging Meta to reverse course.

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