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Today's Connections: Sports Edition will be easier if you watch international soccer.

As we've shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular New York Times word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans.

Like the original Connections, the game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight, and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier — so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.

If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable What is Connections: Sports Edition?

The NYT's latest daily word game has launched in association with The Athletic, the New York Times property that provides the publication's sports coverage. The sports Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.

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Each puzzle features 16 words, and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.

If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake — players get up to four mistakes before the game ends.

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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.

SEE ALSO: Wordle-obsessed? These are the best word games to play IRL. Here's a hint for today's Connections: Sports Edition categories

Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:

• Yellow: Basketball moves

• Green: Inside the arena

• Blue: Baseball champions

• Purple: Unfinished movie

Here are today's Connections: Sports Edition categories

Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:

• Yellow: Actions with a Basketball

• Green: Found at the Top of an Arena

• Blue: World Series MVPs

• Purple: First Words of Football Movies

Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.

Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.

Drumroll, please!

The solution to today's Connections: Sports Edition #645 is...

What is the answer to Connections: Sports Edition today?

• Actions with a Basketball: DRIBBLE, PASS, PIVOT, SHOOT

• Found at the Top of an Arena: BANNERS, CATWALK, LIGHTS, SPEAKERS

• World Series MVPs: DENT, KNIGHT, SPRINGER, VIOLA

• First Words of Football Movies: FRIDAY, GRIDIRON, REMEMBER, VARSITY

Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new sports Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

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 Connections.

Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalogue.

Released in August 2025, Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.

Currently, if you're stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move on to the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.

How to play Pips

If you've ever played dominoes, you'll have a passing familiarity with how Pips is played. As we've shared in our previous hints stories for Pips, the tiles, like dominoes, are placed vertically or horizontally and connect with each other. The main difference between a traditional game of dominoes and Pips is the color-coded conditions you have to address. The touching tiles don't necessarily have to match.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for June 30, 2026

The conditions you have to meet are specific to the color-coded spaces. For example, if it provides a single number, every side of a tile in that space must add up to the number provided. It is possible — and common — for only half a tile to be within a color-coded space.

Here are common examples you'll run into across the difficulty levels:

• Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.

• Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.

• Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.

• Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.

• Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.

If an area does not have any color coding, it means there are no conditions on the portions of dominoes within those spaces.

SEE ALSO: NYT Strands hints, answers for June 30, 2026 Easy difficulty hints, answers for June 30 Pips

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 0-4, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 0-4, placed vertically; 2-2, placed horizontally; 0-0, placed vertically.

Equal (5): Everything in this space must be equal to 5. The answer is 5-1, placed vertically.

Less Than (2): Everything in this space must be less than 2. The answer is 0-0, placed vertically.

Less Than (5): Everything in this space must be less than 5. The answer is 5-1, placed vertically.

Medium difficulty hints, answers for June 30 Pips

Less Than (6): Everything in this space must be less than 6. The answer is 5-1, placed vertically.

Less Than (4): Everything in this space must be less than 4. The answer is 3-4, placed vertically.

Less Than (5): Everything in this space must be less than 5. The answer is 3-1, placed horizontally.

Less Than (6): Everything in this space must be less than 6. The answer is 5-1, placed vertically; 1-6, placed horizontally; 3-1, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed vertically.

Equal (6): Everything in this space must be equal to 6. The answer is 1-6, placed horizontally; 6-3, placed vertically.

Equal (4): Everything in this space must be equal to 4. The answer is 3-4, placed vertically; 4-4, placed vertically.

Less Than (3): Everything in this space must be less than 3. The answer is 2-2, placed vertically.

Hard difficulty hints, answers for June 30 Pips

Equal (6): Everything in this space must be equal to 6. The answer is 6-5, placed vertically; 6-3, placed horizontally.

Number (8): Everything in this space must add up to 8. The answer is 6-3, placed horizontally; 5-3, placed vertically.

Equal (5): Everything in this space must be equal to 5. The answer is 6-5, placed vertically; 5-2, placed vertically.

Equal (3): Everything in this space must be equal to 3. The answer is 5-3, placed vertically; 3-4, placed vertically.

Equal (4): Everything in this space must be equal to 4. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally; 3-4, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 5-2, placed vertically; 1-1, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-1, placed vertically.

Less Than (3): Everything in this space must be less than 3. The answer is 4-1, placed vertically.

Number (5): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 2-2, placed horizontally; 1-6, placed vertically.

Number (12): Everything in this space must add up to 12. The answer is 1-6, placed vertically; 4-6, placed horizontally.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-6, placed horizontally.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-5, placed vertically.

Number (15): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 4-5, placed vertically; 5-5, placed horizontally.

Number (5): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 3-2, placed vertically.

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.

There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.

An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.

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If you find yourself stuck at any step of today's Hurdle, don't worry! We have you covered.

SEE ALSO: Hurdle: Everything you need to know to find the answers Hurdle Word 1 hint

To tweak.

SEE ALSO: Apple’s new M3 MacBook Air is $300 off at Amazon. And yes, I’m tempted. Hurdle Word 1 answer

ALTER

Hurdle Word 2 hint

A leg workout.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for June 30, 2026 Hurdle Word 2 Answer

SQUAT

Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today

Hurdle Word 3 hint

Put into place.

SEE ALSO: NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for June 30 SEE ALSO: NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for June 30, 2026 Hurdle Word 3 answer

AFFIX

Hurdle Word 4 hint

Large fruit.

Hurdle Word 4 answer

MELON

Final Hurdle hint

A parody.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Games available on Mashable Hurdle Word 5 answer

FARCE

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you're an environmentalist.

Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that's captured the public's attention. The game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.

If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today's Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable What is Connections?

The NYT's latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications' Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.

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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.

If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.

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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.

SEE ALSO: NYT Pips hints, answers for June 30, 2026 Here's a hint for today's Connections categories

Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:

• Yellow: Partitions

• Green: Cold sports

• Blue: Reduce, reuse...

• Purple: Sports recruitment

Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today

Here are today's Connections categories

Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:

• Yellow: Dividing structures

• Green: Participate in some winter Olympics

• Blue: Common recyclables

• Purple: What "Draft" might refer to

Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.

Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.

Drumroll, please!

The solution to today's Connections #1115 is...

What is the answer to Connections today

• Dividing structures: FENCE, GATE, HEDGE, WALL

• Participate in some winter Olympics: CURL, LUGE, SKATE, SKI

• Common recyclables: BOTTLE, BOX, CAN, NEWSPAPER

• What "Draft" might refer to: BREEZE, ON TAP, RECRUIT, SKETCH

Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

SEE ALSO: NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for June 30, 2026

Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today's puzzle.

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 Connections.

Today's NYT Strands hints are easy if you're a cinephile.

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.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable

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.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for June 30, 2026 NYT Strands hint for today’s theme: "And... action!"

The words are related to film.

Today’s NYT Strands theme plainly explained

These words describe a film set.

NYT Strands spangram hint: Is it vertical or horizontal?

Today's NYT Strands spangram is vertical.

Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today

NYT Strands spangram answer today

Today's spangram is That's Showbiz.

NYT Strands word list for June 30

• Director

• Cast

• Crew

• Producer

• Editor

• That's Showbiz

• Writer

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.

Today's Wordle answer should be easy to solve if you're a dog lover.

If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for today's Wordle solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable SEE ALSO: NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for June 30, 2026 Where did Wordle come from?

Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble, music identification game Heardle, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once. 

Wordle eventually became so popular that it was purchased by the New York Times, and TikTok creators even livestream themselves playing.

What's the best Wordle starting word?

The best Wordle starting word is the one that speaks to you. But if you prefer to be strategic in your approach, we have a few ideas to help you pick a word that might help you find the solution faster. One tip is to select a word that includes at least two different vowels, plus some common consonants like S, T, R, or N.

What happened to the Wordle archive?

The entire archive of past Wordle puzzles was originally available for anyone to enjoy whenever they felt like it, but it was later taken down, with the website's creator stating it was done at the request of the New York Times. However, the New York Times then rolled out its own Wordle Archive, available only to NYT Games subscribers.

Is Wordle getting harder?

It might feel like Wordle is getting harder, but it actually isn't any more difficult than when it first began. You can turn on Wordle's Hard Mode if you're after more of a challenge, though.

SEE ALSO: NYT Pips hints, answers for June 30, 2026 Here's a subtle hint for today's Wordle answer:

A small dog.

Does today's Wordle answer have a double letter?

The letter P appears three times.

Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today

Today's Wordle is a 5-letter word that starts with...

Today's Wordle starts with the letter P.

SEE ALSO: Wordle-obsessed? These are the best word games to play IRL. The Wordle answer today is...

Get your last guesses in now, because it's your final chance to solve today's Wordle before we reveal the solution.

Drumroll please!

The solution to today's Wordle is...

PUPPY

Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be a new Wordle for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints. Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

Reporting by Chance Townsend, Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo, Shannon Connellan, Cecily Mauran, Mike Pearl, and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.

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 Wordle.

NASA's new prototype rover ERNEST is made to test technologies for moon and mars exploration.

Discover how modern banking apps help parents teach their kids financial responsibility in an increasingly cashless world. Learn how to set spending limits, assign chores, and build smart money habits from childhood to the early adult years.

South Korea’s World Cup exit did not just end with a sad locker room and fans yelling at their TVs. It has made its way across the president's desk.

After South Korea’s elimination from Group A on Saturday, June 27, head coach Hong Myung-bo resigned the next day, ending a turbulent second stint in charge of the national team.

"I deeply apologize to the Korean public who supported our team. Today, I am stepping down," Hong said in a press conference. "Taking this job was never an easy choice, but from the moment I accepted it, my only focus was to fulfill my duties responsibly until the end."

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But the fallout from the loss did not stop with him.

On Sunday, June 28, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for a formal government investigation into the team’s disappointing tournament, while fan anger spilled from social media into real-world security concerns ahead of the squad’s return home.

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On paper, South Korea’s tournament wasn't all bad. The team opened with a 2-1 win over Czechia before losing 0-1 to Mexico, which meant the final group match against South Africa mattered: A win would have put South Korea in a much stronger position to advance, and even a draw could have helped its case under the expanded World Cup format, which allows the eight best third-place teams to reach the Round of 32. Instead, South Korea lost 0-1, finished third in Group A with three points, and had to wait for other results to learn whether that would be enough. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

It was Hong’s lineup choice against South Africa, though, that enraged fans the most. In the match South Korea needed to rescue its tournament, Hong left Son Heung-min out of the starting lineup, saying afterward that he planned to use him later when South Africa was tired. Son came on at halftime, but by then South Korea was already chasing the game.

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Hong later admitted he would not make the same decision again, but by then the damage had already been done. And the wave of hate from home that has gone far beyond standard post-tournament disappointment.

Reports out of South Korea have described online death threats against Hong, heightened police security ahead of the team’s return to Incheon International Airport, and furious fan reaction across social media.

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Fans are especially frustrated because South Korea had enough talent to expect more. The team included Son Heung-min, one of Asia’s biggest soccer stars, along with European-based players like Lee Kang-in and Kim Min-jae. Son Heung-min, the team’s captain, has posted a lengthy apology on Instagram, asking supporters not to direct excessive criticism and hurt toward the players.

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Hong's return as head coach in 2024 had already been controversial, with fans questioning whether the Korea Football Association had run a fair hiring process. The sports ministry previously alleged that the KFA had not followed its own procedures, including reportedly "a reasonable interview process."

President Lee made clear that he sees the collapse as more than a bad coaching spell. In a statement posted to social media, Lee said he felt "not just confusion but utter bewilderment" over the result and argued that South Korea’s early exit reflected deeper problems with leadership and personnel decisions.

"When favoritism and cronyism take precedence over competence in selecting a commander, the result is as predictable as fire burning paper," Lee wrote.

Lee also pointed to the taxpayer money and state resources used to support the national team, making the case that the World Cup failure was not just a private soccer matter. Because public money goes into the team’s participation, he argued, the public is owed a clearer explanation of what went wrong. He called on the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to investigate the circumstances around the exit, analyze the causes, and propose reforms to prevent a repeat.

If that sounds like an unusually dramatic response to a World Cup exit, it is not entirely without precedent.

The closest comparison may be France in 2010, when Les Bleus imploded at the World Cup in South Africa after Nicolas Anelka was sent home and the players boycotted training in protest. The disaster quickly moved beyond the locker room: then-President Nicolas Sarkozy publicly condemned the team’s behavior, captain Thierry Henry was brought to the Élysée Palace, and France’s parliament held hearings into the national team’s failure.

For Hong, this ending is especially complicated. As a player, he remains one of the most important figures in South Korean soccer history, having captained the country during its historic run to the 2002 World Cup semifinals. As a coach, though, both of his World Cup stints with the national team have ended in group-stage disappointment: first in 2014, and now again in 2026.

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There were security concerns around Hong's return home. It seems to be just as rowdy as they expected, according to video footage from the airport at 4 a.m., where fans were waiting in the Arrivals hall armed with insults.

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This, alarmingly, is not the first time South Korean fans have quite literally thrown eggs at their home team.

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For South Korea, the World Cup may be over, but its clear a very dramatic postmortem is just getting started.

Reports say Samsung will expand its Galaxy S27 line to four phones with the addition of the new Galaxy S27 Pro. It's designed for those who want Ultra-level power in a smaller body. Here's everything we've heard, including a privacy feature that debuted on the Ultra.

Streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus have huge global libraries. The only problem is accessing them from one place. Here's how to use a VPN to watch virtually everything online. 

We tested the new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ with Intel’s Arc G3 Extreme processor. With a chip designed specifically for PC gaming handhelds, what type of gaming frame rates can you expect?

That's it, stick a fork in June, it's done. And while Paramount+ knocked out some solid hits, from Scream 7 and a new season of The Agency to Beavis and Butt-Head to, oh yeah, the UFC at the White House, there are still some solid movies in its formidable library to get you through the month's final week.

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TL;DR: Live stream Netherlands vs. Morocco in the 2026 FIFA World Cup for free on ITVX. Access this free streaming platform from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN, an Official Supporter of the FIFA World Cup 2026.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup showcases three huge games from the Round of 32 on June 29, including Netherlands vs. Morocco.

The Netherlands have looked really impressive in this tournament at times, but they've also shown some vulnerable flashes. Morocco, on the other hand, stunned Brazil with their quality in the group stage and notched up comfortable wins against Scotland and Haiti. All of which makes this an interesting matchup. You could easily imagine this contest taking place much later in the tournament.

If you want to watch Netherlands vs. Morocco in the 2026 FIFA World Cup from anywhere in the world, we have all the information you need.

When is Netherlands vs. Morocco?

Netherlands vs. Morocco in the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off at 9 p.m. ET on June 29. This fixture takes place at Monterrey Stadium.

How to watch Netherlands vs. Morocco for free

Netherlands vs. Morocco in the 2026 FIFA World Cup is available to live stream for free on ITVX.

ITVX is geo-restricted to the UK, but anyone can access this free streaming platform with a VPN. These tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in the UK, meaning you can unblock ITVX to live stream the 2026 World Cup for free from anywhere in the world.

Live stream Netherlands vs. Morocco for free by following these simple steps:

1. Subscribe to a streaming-friendly VPN (we recommend ExpressVPN)

2. Download the app to your device of choice (the best VPNs have apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and more)

3. Open up the app and connect to a server in the UK

4. Visit ITVX

5. Watch Netherlands vs. Morocco for free from anywhere in the world

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The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but most do offer free-trials or money-back guarantees. By leveraging these offers, you can access free live streams of the 2026 World Cup without actually spending anything. This obviously isn't a long-term solution, but it does give you enough time to stream Netherlands vs. Morocco (plus more World Cup fixtures) before recovering your investment.

ExpressVPN's regular 30-day money-back guarantee is not available for any subscriptions purchased during the FIFA World Cup between June 10 and July 11. ExpressVPN remains our top pick for sport, but you will need to pay the monthly rate. Alternatively, Proton VPN still offers that all-important money-back guarantee.

What is the best VPN for ITVX?

ExpressVPN is the best choice for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream live sport on ITVX, for a number of reasons:

• Servers in 105 countries including the UK

• Easy-to-use app available on all major devices including iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and more

• Strict no-logging policy so your data is secure

• Fast connection speeds free from throttling

• Up to 10 simultaneous connections

A two-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $68.40 and includes an extra four months for free — 81% off for a limited time. Alternatively, you can get a one-month plan for just $12.99. That covers you for the duration of the World Cup.

Live stream Netherlands vs. Morocco in the 2026 FIFA World Cup for free.

Most EVs, like their gasoline counterparts, require owners to return to the dealership for regular maintenance. All legacy automakers selling electric vehicles have service and repair models built around their specific dealer networks, training, and tools. How readily available that service and repair information is to owners, independent shops, and the general public is the subject of an ongoing debate known as Right to Repair.

At a glance

• Today’s AI agents don’t remember past interactions. They must repeatedly be fed relevant information or retrieve it from external sources, which becomes less efficient as they handle longer and more complex tasks. To scale agent capabilities, we need a more efficient way to retain and access information over time.
• Memora is a scalable memory system that dramatically increases agent productivity on long-horizon tasks by decoupling what is stored (rich memory content) from how it’s retrieved (lightweight abstractions and cue anchors), balancing abstraction and specificity.
• Memora sets new state-of-the-art on LoCoMo and LongMemEval, outperforming Mem0, RAG, and full-context inference while using up to 98% fewer context tokens.
• Memora paper (opens in new tab) is published at ICML 2026. Memora code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Memora (opens in new tab).

Imagine a workplace AI assistant helping you run a multi-month project. Over weeks of conversations, you share constraints, agree on milestones, revise deadlines, and surface dozens of stakeholder preferences. When you later ask it to draft an update for a colleague, it should recall not just the latest decision but the journey that got you there: what was tried, what was ruled out, who weighed in. Today’s AI agents struggle with this. Modern large language models (LLMs) are powerful reasoners, but they are effectively stateless: every session starts from zero, every long conversation forces the model to re-read its entire history, and every new piece of information is either stored as raw text (fragmented and noisy) or compressed into a vague summary (precise details lost). As AI assistants and autonomous agents move into long-horizon deployments, such as copilots that tracks a project for many months or even research agents that build up domain expertise with long horizon usage, the absence of principled memory system has become the critical bottleneck.

A growing line of work has begun to fill this gap. Systems like Mem0 extract atomic facts from conversations; retrieval-augmented (RAG) approaches index raw text fragments for later recall; and graph-based memory systems such as Zep and GraphRAG impose structure through entity relations. Each represents real progress, yet each runs into the same wall: existing designs force an unavoidable tradeoff between specificity (preserving fine-grained detail) and abstraction (organizing memory efficiently as it grows). Memora is built to give agents both.

What is Memora

Memora is an agentic memory framework designed for long-horizon AI agents. Memora’s central insight is to decouple what is stored from how it is retrieved. Memory content can remain rich and expressive, such as a project timeline, a multi-turn discussion about constraints, while a separate, lightweight structural layer handles indexing and retrieval. The result is a memory system that scales: it consolidates related information into stable units, surfaces fine-grained details when they matter, and lets the agent navigate its own history without re-reading everything. On standard long-conversation benchmarks, Memora sets new state-of-the-art performance while using up to 98% fewer tokens than would be consumed by dumping the full history into context.

Why this is hard: the abstraction–specificity tension

Existing memory systems fall into two extremes. Content-fragmentation systems, such as RAG and Mem0, embed extracted facts or text fragments directly. This preserves detail but produces brittle, isolated entries that lose narrative coherence. Coarse-abstraction systems compress experience into compact summaries. They are efficient, but summarization strips away the constraints, edge cases, and numeric details that make memory useful in the first place. Graph-based systems add structure on top of content, yet still rely on the content itself for retrieval and typically require rigid ontologies that don’t generalize across domains. None of these resolves the underlying tension between abstraction (which keeps memory efficient) and specificity (which gives memory utility).

Figure 1: Architecture overview of Memora. How Memora works

Memora resolves this tension through a harmonic organization. Each memory entry has two components: a primary abstraction, which a short phrase (6–8 words) that captures what the memory is fundamentally about, and a memory value holding the rich content itself. Crucially, only the primary abstraction is embedded for similarity search; the value is never directly retrieved through its own content. This separation means new information about an evolving topic merges into the existing memory entry under the same primary abstraction, rather than fragmenting into a chain of partial duplicates. Complementing primary abstractions, cue anchors are short, context-aware tags extracted from each memory’s value, providing alternative access paths to the same memory. They function as flexible, organically-generated metadata.

To make this concrete: suppose a user says, “Dave and Sarah agreed to push the prototype to April 1, the pilot to May 2, and the MVP to May 30.” A knowledge-graph system would need predefined entity types and relation schemas: Person → agreed_on → Milestone → has_date → Date, and any new relation type would require schema extension. In Memora, the primary abstraction Updated Project Orion timeline agreed by Dave and Sarah serves as the canonical access point, while cue anchors like Dave Project Orion update, Project Orion prototype schedule, and Project Orion pilot timeline provide alternative retrieval paths — all without committing to an ontology. A later query about Dave’s recent contributions, or the prototype schedule, or pilot timing can all route to the same underlying memory through different cues, with the full detail preserved in the memory value.

On top of this representation, Memora introduces a policy-guided retriever that treats memory access as an active reasoning process. Rather than returning the top-k semantically similar items in a single shot, the policy retriever iteratively refines its query, expands through cue anchors to surface related-but-not-similar memories, and decides when to stop. This lets the agent navigate to relevant non-local context that pure semantic search would miss, chasing multi-hop dependencies the way a human would when recalling connected events. The retrieval policy can be either hand-prompted with a strong LLM or distilled into a much smaller model via reinforcement learning.

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Start now Opens in a new tab Results Figure 2: Memora performance on LoCoMo dataset.

We evaluate Memora on two long-context benchmarks: LoCoMo, where dialogues average 600 turns, and LongMemEval, with 115,000-token contexts. Memora achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both: 86.3% LLM-judge accuracy on LoCoMo and 87.4% on LongMemEval, outperforming RAG, Mem0, Nemori, Zep, LangMem, and even full-context inference. The gap is largest on multi-hop reasoning, where Memora’s ability to traverse cue anchors pays the biggest dividends. The efficiency story is just as striking: Memora stores roughly half the memory entries per conversation that Mem0 does (344 vs. 651) and reduces token consumption by up to 98% relative to full-context inference. Less to read, less to store, better answers.

Looking forward

Memora’s design has implications beyond benchmark performance. We see this work as a step toward AI agents that can sustain long-term collaboration with users and accumulate organizational knowledge over months and years, not just within a single session. Building on this foundation, we are pursuing several complementary directions. MemLoop explores how memory systems can learn from retrieval and task failures, attribute errors to specific stages of the memory pipeline, and improve themselves over time. Deferred Memory investigates when memory construction should be postponed until sufficient context, evidence, or future utility becomes available, rather than committing prematurely to what should be stored. Group Memory examines how knowledge can be shared across teams and agents while preserving provenance, access boundaries, ownership, and sensitive context. We release our code alongside the paper and invite the community to build on this representation and explore what becomes possible when AI agents are no longer stateless.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Shantanu Dixit (Research Fellow) Paramaguru Harimurugan (Research Fellow), Rujia Wang, Victor Rühle, and Robert Sim for contributing to this project.

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The post Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificity appeared first on Microsoft Research.

It's been a week since President Trump signed an executive order directing a whole-of-government push on quantum computing — funding it, securing its supply chains, building its workforce, and making sure adversaries like China don't get there first.

This marks a significant federal commitment to a technology that is either the next great computing revolution, or the most expensive science experiment in history, depending on the expert opinion. But one thing it can do: replace AI as the carrier of long-term hopes for the tech industry.

This would be the right moment for a switch, as the vibe shifts on AI itself: models are more expensive to train, returns are harder to demonstrate. Investors who have sent AI stock soaring may soon be looking for the next big thing to believe in.

Quantum computing — with its theoretical promise of solving problems that would take classical computers millennia — is a real and genuinely fascinating technology. It's just a lot more complicated, and further away, than the White House-led hype suggests.

What is quantum computing?

Your laptop processes information in bits. Tiny switches in a computer see data in binary code: either as a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers swap those out for qubits, which can exist as 0, 1, or a combination of both at the same time — a property called superposition.

Which, if we can harness it, would fundamentally supercharge everything a computer can do.

As IBM describes it, think of solving a maze. A classical computer tries every path until it finds the exit. A quantum computer, by using the interference patterns of qubits — the way their probability waves cancel out wrong answers and amplify right ones — can zero in on solutions without brute-forcing every option.

Add entanglement, where qubits become so linked that measuring one instantly tells you about others, and you have a machine that approaches certain problems in a completely different way than anything humanity has built before.

For one thing, researchers say, a fully functional quantum computer would likely mean the death of Bitcoin.

What can it do?

Still, the most credible near-term applications are in science and industry, not consumer tech. Quantum computers are particularly well-suited to simulating molecular behavior — which could dramatically accelerate drug discovery and materials science — and to crunching complex optimization problems in finance and logistics.

According to IBM, the field is projected to grow into a $1.3 trillion industry by 2035, with major players like Google and Microsoft, as well as startups like IonQ, already investing heavily.

An MIT report from 2025 found that quantum computing patents have grown fivefold over the last decade, venture capital hit a new high of $1.6 billion in 2024, and demand for quantum skills has nearly tripled since 2018.

Business executives, the report noted, are increasingly "quantum curious" — in part because watching AI explode taught them not to sleep on the next big thing.

Why is there a 'but'?

The gap between what quantum computers can theoretically do, and what they can actually do right now, remains enormous.

According to IBM, current quantum processors are fragile, error-prone, and require cooling to temperatures colder than outer space to function. A researcher on r/Physics who works in quantum information put it plainly: the commercial use cases are "speculative at best," and the classical computing baseline is "shifting so fast it's impossible to get a read on the gap."

Engineering bottlenecks, such as error correction, qubit stability, and scaling, also remain major unsolved problems. IBM says it's targeting 200 logical qubits by 2029 and 2,000 by 2033. These are timelines that make quantum computing a decades-long project, not an imminent revolution.

Why is the Trump administration suddenly all in?

Last week, President Trump signed Executive Order 14413, directing a sweeping whole-of-government push to accelerate quantum computing research, secure domestic supply chains, expand the quantum workforce, and prevent adversaries — China specifically holds 60 percent of global quantum patents, per MIT's report — from gaining a strategic edge.

The order establishes a new effort to build a quantum computer at a Department of Energy facility and sets aggressive timelines across multiple agencies.

It's a legitimate national security concern, dressed up in the language of a tech boom. Like fusion power, quantum computing is real and will matter — probably a lot — but the current moment looks a lot like the early AI hype cycle. Expect lots of startups with "quantum" in their name to launch as a result.

The biggest user-facing feature in Android 17 is App Bubbles. It’s a brand new way to multitask—well, it’s brand new if you’re a Pixel owner. Samsung has beaten Google to countless ideas over the years, and App Bubbles is just the latest.

Meta is finally preparing to roll out usernames on WhatsApp so users no longer have to share their phone number on the app. And users can reserve their preferred username right now.

WhatsApp has been integrating usernames into the platform for more than a year now, after the feature was discovered in a beta version of the app.

Now, it seems Meta is finally ready to roll out the new feature as WhatsApp is now letting users reserve usernames. 

"It’s time to reserve your WhatsApp username," reads a blog post on WhatsApps' website.

To reserve your WhatsApp username, simply open up the WhatsApp mobile app, go to your account settings, and tap "Username" under the "Your account" section.

"Usernames are coming soon," reads the window that opens up. "Reserve yours today."

Users can then choose to create a new username or use their Instagram or Facebook username.

WhatsApp users should reserve their chosen username as soon as possible. However, it seems users who just want to use their Facebook or Instagram username have no need to rush. WhatsApp confirmed in a post that the company "knows that some people like creators, small businesses, and organizations may want to maintain a consistent presence online" and so "for them, we reserved an option to claim their existing Instagram or Facebook username on WhatsApp."

When I attempted to register my preferred username, it said it was unavailable, but I could log in to Instagram or Facebook and choose it if it was the same username I used on those platforms (it was). Once logged into my Instagram account via WhatsApp, my preferred WhatsApp username suddenly became available.

Usernames have long been requested on WhatsApp. Users are forced to use their phone number as their WhatsApp identity, which creates obvious problems if they want to keep their phone number separate from their WhatsApp presence.

With more than 3 billion users on the platform, WhatsApp usernames will likely go fast, so if you don't already have your preferred username reserved via Facebook or Instagram, you should probably go register it now.