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A new NYT Strands puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing 'today's game' while others are playing 'yesterday's'. If you're looking for Monday's puzzle instead then click here: NYT Strands hints and answers for Monday, July 21 (game #505).

Strands is the NYT's latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it's great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc's Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don't read on if you don't want to know the answers.

• Today's NYT Strands theme is… Pet store purchase

Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.

• TIRE
• QUOTA
• PURE
• SLAP
• TUSK
• TRIP

• Spangram has 8 letters

First side: top, 4th column

Last side: bottom, 4th column

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM.

The answers to today's Strands, game #506, are…

• FISH
• PUMP
• ROCKS
• TANK
• FILTER
• PLANTS
• THERMOMETER
• SPANGRAM: AQUARIUM

• My rating: Hard
• My score: Perfect

It always amazes me how well words are hidden within Strands. THERMOMETER, for example, is a pretty long word – but I was totally oblivious to its existence, hanging around in the bottom right-hand corner, until the very end of my game.

When I first started looking I thought that we were searching for animals you might buy at a pet shop, so after getting FISH I was searching in vain for dogs, cats, hamsters… Then after getting PUMP I joined the dots and found a home for the letter Q.

An AQUARIUM must surely rank as one of the most neglected items in western homes – second perhaps to exercise bikes, purchased with grand plans of creating an exotic world filled with beautiful fish but then abandoned as they all eat each other and you realize fish aren’t as beautiful as you first thought.

• KITE
• FROG
• FISH
• CRANE
• BUTTERFLY
• SPANGRAM: ORIGAMI

Strands is the NYT's not-so-new-any-more word game, following Wordle and Connections. It's now a fully fledged member of the NYT's games stable that has been running for a year and which can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.

I've got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you're struggling to beat it each day.

A new Quordle puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing 'today's game' while others are playing 'yesterday's'. If you're looking for Monday's puzzle instead then click here: Quordle hints and answers for Monday, July 21 (game #1274).

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,100 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc's Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about Quordle today is below, so don't read on if you don't want to know the answers.

• The number of different vowels in Quordle today is 4*.

* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too).

• The number of Quordle answers containing a repeated letter today is 1.

• No. None of Q, Z, X or J appear among today's Quordle answers.

• The number of today's Quordle answers starting with the same letter is 0.

If you just want to know the answers at this stage, simply scroll down. If you're not ready yet then here's one more clue to make things a lot easier:

• O

• G

• V

• A

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM.

The answers to today's Quordle, game #1275, are…

• OPTIC
• GIDDY
• VOCAL
• ADULT

It’s a wonderful feeling when you enter a word into Quordle and you don’t even have to wait for it to turn green as you know it’s right. That was the case for three of my words today, but the last one was a pure guess.

With O locked in as the second letter and L-A-C all in incorrect positions, I thought a word ending O-C-A-L was the most likely, but I had three options with focal, local, and the one I picked, VOCAL – purely because I know how much Quordle loves the oft-overlooked letter V.

The answers to today's Quordle Daily Sequence, game #1275, are…

• PLAIN
• RISKY
• MONEY
• LITHE

• Quordle #1274, Monday, 21 July: KNEED, SNAIL, PINTO, FEAST
• Quordle #1273, Sunday, 20 July: GRACE, COUNT, EGRET, GIANT
• Quordle #1272, Saturday, 19 July: EARLY, CLICK, TRITE, SPREE
• Quordle #1271, Friday, 18 July: CINCH, FOYER, FUDGE, TAFFY
• Quordle #1270, Thursday, 17 July: CRESS, TABOO, POWER, HATER
• Quordle #1269, Wednesday, 16 July: UNCLE, NADIR, REMIT, BROOM
• Quordle #1268, Tuesday, 15 July: VILLA, FLECK, TIGER, CRANE
• Quordle #1267, Monday, 14 July: SURGE, PIZZA, PAPER, POPPY
• Quordle #1266, Sunday, 13 July: KAYAK, DECRY, RUDDY, HATER
• Quordle #1265, Saturday, 12 July: WREAK, NANNY, CLASP, STAIN
• Quordle #1264, Friday, 11 July: LAPEL, DRAIN, FROND, GROSS
• Quordle #1263, Thursday, 10 July: CROSS, WHEEL, UNDID, PENCE
• Quordle #1262, Wednesday, 9 July: SHIRE, SIXTH, SINGE, IMAGE
• Quordle #1261, Tuesday, 8 July: PLIED, PRANK, GAWKY, OXIDE
• Quordle #1260, Monday, 7 July: DROLL, TRUCE, TWIRL, SINCE
• Quordle #1259, Sunday, 6 July: AMPLY, SPAWN, EXTOL, RIDGE
• Quordle #1258, Saturday, 5 July: HAVEN, SNAKE, DREAM, TORUS
• Quordle #1257, Friday, 4 July: FAVOR, SKUNK, GAWKY, FLUFF
• Quordle #1256, Thursday, 3 July: DANCE, EYING, GLAZE, EGRET

The relationship between data and AI is inherently symbiotic: better data enables better AI, and better AI allows for more sophisticated data processing. This virtuous cycle should accelerate enterprise AI adoption, yet most organizations find themselves stuck before it even begins.

The culprit isn't computational power or model sophistication — it's data variety. While enterprises rush to deploy large language models and agentic systems, they're discovering that the messy, inconsistent, and wildly diverse nature of their data creates an insurmountable bottleneck.

The statistics tell a sobering story. While 94% of data and AI leaders say interest in AI is leading to a greater focus on data, 75% of surveyed leaders find AI adoption challenging, with 69% saying most AI projects don't make it into live operational use. Of companies that reported cost reductions from AI, most had savings of less than 10 percent, while those with revenue increases mostly reported gains of less than 5 percent.

Yes, we've all heard about data volume and velocity. But it's not the size or speed that trips up AI projects — it's the fact that data is messy, diverse, and wildly inconsistent across systems, formats, and structures within organizations and among external partners. With data volumes expected to increase more than tenfold from 2020 to 2030, this challenge is rapidly intensifying.

Enterprise data variety shows up across multiple, compounding layers that create exponential complexity. Every SaaS application, database, file system, and partner platform speaks a different language, requiring dozens or sometimes hundreds of unique connectors just to establish basic connectivity.

Each connector has to handle data arriving in countless forms: structured formats like CSV and JSON, semi-structured content like XML and spreadsheets, and fully unstructured materials including PDFs, contracts, images, and emails. Each requires context-sensitive parsing to extract usable information.

Even when dealing with the same business concepts, different systems use entirely different definitions and schemas. "Customer ID" in your CRM may bear no resemblance to "Account Number" in your billing software. Meanwhile, APIs evolve, vendors update fields, and data formats change mid-stream, making integration a constant maintenance challenge rather than a one-time effort.

External data compounds this complexity exponentially. While internal systems can be well controlled, external data sources from partners, suppliers, regulators, and customers introduce constant variability. New data providers mean new schemas, and existing ones may change unexpectedly without warning.

It's tempting to believe that AI, especially large language models, can simply be pointed to a data system, allowing AI-powered code generation to ingest raw data and figure it all out. In reality, there are multiple layers of technical challenges to solve when building truly enterprise-grade, reliable, and scalable integrations. Moreover, testing and maintaining integrations in light of the fact that many systems aren’t even well documented, makes this a problem that is incredibly hard for both humans and AI.

The combined human and AI effort, however, is very promising. It starts with taking advantage of the fact that AI excels at pattern recognition, suggesting schema mappings, and parsing unstructured content. But the foundational work of orchestration, reliable connectors, business logic implementation, and governance requires engineering discipline that pure AI cannot deliver alone.

Finally comes the people and process factor. Data and AI leaders consistently agree that cultural and change management challenges are the primary barrier to becoming data- and AI-driven, suggesting that technology alone is insufficient for success.

The path forward isn't pure AI or pure software engineering — it's their thoughtful combination. We need AI-powered software abstractions that allow systems to adapt to variety rather than fight it.

At each layer of the data stack, AI assists while software engineering principles enforce durability, reliability, and governance:

Virtual data products represent a particularly powerful abstraction in this hybrid approach. By creating consistent, reusable interfaces that act as contracts between data producers and consumers, organizations can decouple physical data location and format from actual usage. This abstraction layer enables seamless collaboration while supporting diverse data formats without complex coding or integration barriers.

Modern platforms now support multi-speed data processing, allowing data pipelines to be defined once but operate across different processing engines and latencies. This flexibility ensures that real-time, batch, and streaming workloads can coexist within the same architectural framework.

Perhaps most importantly, successful implementations maintain human-in-the-loop collaboration where AI assists but humans validate critical decisions around schema inference, semantic mapping, and business logic. For example, newer standards like MCP and A2A are making it possible for AI to discover and recommend integrations or flows.

Data products that support MCP enable AI to discover the right data and actions, and then make recommendations for end-to-end integration. But engineers are still needed to establish governance, security, and guardrails against errors in AI-based planning to ensure that business needs are met.

Maintenance and assurance of quality as new model versions come is another key guardrail that engineers will build. This approach keeps integrations reliable while dramatically improving speed and scalability.

Enterprises that solve data variety challenges don't just reduce integration headaches — they unlock genuine competitive advantages. AI project cycles shrink from months to weeks when teams spend less time preparing data and more time using it.

Integration costs and times drop dramatically when reusable data products eliminate redundant connector development. When combined with the latest standards, they enable AI to help deliver more of the integration work.

Most significantly, model performance improves substantially thanks to higher-quality inputs, while teams can focus on innovation rather than data plumbing.

As PwC notes in their 2025 AI predictions, "A shrewd strategy will instead emphasize what can set you apart — how you leverage AI with your institutional knowledge and proprietary data". The companies that engineer for data variety early, using thoughtful combinations of AI, software engineering, and domain expertise, will find themselves with sustainable competitive moats.

As AI models become increasingly commoditized and accessible, the real differentiator won't be better models — it'll be better data systems. With more than 80 percent of organizations not yet seeing a tangible enterprise-level impact from generative AI, and most companies not even using half of their data, those that solve the data variety challenge will pull ahead decisively.

Ultimately, AI-ready data isn't about having more data — it's about having the right data, in the right shape, at the right time. The AI race won't be won in model labs. It will be won in the trenches of data integration, where variety is tamed via a rich collaboration between intelligent engineering and AI rather than magically solved by AI.

B=We list the best data recovery service and the best data recovery software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

What if editing photos on your phone felt as natural and capable as editing on a desktop computer? That’s exactly what Luminar’s mobile photo editor (available for Android, ChromeOS and iOS) is built for. Whether you’re a photo enthusiast capturing everyday scenes or a working photographer creating content on location, having reliable AI tools on your phone can streamline your workflow and bring more flexibility to your creative process.

Luminar’s mobile photo editor isn’t just another camera app with filters. It’s built specifically for photographers, with tools that focus on enhancing photos so they look real to life, not over-processed or artificial. From subtle corrections to advanced AI-driven enhancements, every tool is designed to support a photographer’s vision while keeping the image natural and true to its original character.

Smartphone cameras have evolved into powerful creative tools. Many phones now offer impressive image quality, even in challenging lighting conditions. That means more photographers are using mobile devices not only to capture photos, but also to edit and share them. Even top-level pros use smartphones to take behind-the-scenes photos when teaching, documenting lighting setups, sharing live moments, or posting previews while on location.

However, mobile editing often comes with limitations. Slower apps, clunky interfaces, or basic editing features can make it hard to maintain a consistent creative flow. Luminar’s mobile app addresses that by offering intelligent tools that are easy to use and capable of producing high-quality results.

Built with the same design principles as Luminar Neo and available for both iOS and Android/ChromeOS, the mobile editor provides a familiar experience for existing users. While it doesn’t yet offer full integration with the desktop version, both platforms share a similar editing approach, making it easier to transition between mobile and desktop workflows when needed.

The strength of Luminar’s mobile editor lies in its AI-powered tools. These features go beyond simple filters. Each one is designed to solve common editing challenges in a quick and intuitive way, with adjustments that understand the content of the image.

Enhance AI

Enhance AI simplifies the editing process by combining up to twelve core adjustments into a single smart slider. This includes tone, contrast, color, clarity, and more. Instead of spending time making each adjustment manually, the tool analyzes the photo and applies intelligent improvements with just one control.

It’s a fast way to polish an image without compromising detail or making it look over-processed. Enhance AI also works non-destructively, allowing photographers to make changes with confidence, knowing they can always return to the original version if needed.

Relight AI

Lighting is one of the most common challenges in mobile photography. Relight AI provides a simple solution by allowing users to adjust the brightness of the foreground and background independently. This helps improve underexposed subjects without overexposing the background, creating a more balanced and natural-looking photo.

It is especially useful for portraits taken indoors or in backlit conditions where traditional edits might fall short.

Sky AI and Atmosphere AI

Sky AI makes it easy to replace a dull or overexposed sky with something more fitting. Photographers can choose from a variety of skies including sunny, dramatic, and even stormy settings. The tool aligns the new sky seamlessly, accounting for reflections and lighting to make the final image believable and cohesive.

Atmosphere AI adds another layer of mood and texture. With options like mist, haze, and fog, it helps create more depth and emotion in a scene. These effects can be applied subtly or dramatically, depending on the photographer’s vision.

Portrait Tools: Skin AI and Body AI

For portrait photography, the mobile app includes several AI tools designed to enhance without overdoing it. Skin AI gently smooths skin while preserving natural texture and avoiding that artificial look seen in some other apps. Body AI offers subtle adjustments to proportions, helpful in cases where lenses or angles may have distorted a subject’s appearance.

These tools help bring out the best in a portrait while keeping the result natural and respectful to the subject.

One of the biggest advantages of Luminar’s mobile editor is its portability. There’s no need to carry a laptop or other equipment when editing can happen directly on your Android phone or iPhone. This is ideal for photographers who are constantly on the move, whether traveling, shooting events, or capturing spontaneous moments.

Quick edits can be done in the field, and more detailed work can be finished later on a larger screen using Luminar Neo. This flexibility allows for a smoother, more responsive workflow that adjusts to the needs of each shoot.

Luminar’s mobile photo editor is designed with simplicity, efficiency, and quality in mind. The AI tools are intuitive enough for photo enthusiasts and powerful enough for professionals, making them accessible without lowering creative standards.

Most importantly, it’s an app built with photographers in mind. The focus is always on helping images look their best while staying true to how the scene looked and felt when captured. From landscapes and street photography to portraits and travel shots, Luminar helps photographers create natural, clean results they’ll be proud to share.

Ready to see what Luminar’s AI tools can do for your mobile photography? Try the app today and follow @luminar_global on Instagram for editing tips, photo inspiration, and updates from the Luminar community.

• Luminar: Photo Editor on the Google Play Store
• Luminar: Photo Editor on the iOS App Store