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Tech is an essential part of our everyday lives, but finding the right gadgets for your needs — whether it’s for working, staying fit or having fun — can be overwhelming. That’s why we spend countless hours rigorously testing the latest technology, from measuring how fast the top smartphones and laptops actually are to living with headphones and earbuds for weeks on end. We’ve tried out lots of great gadgets this year, but here are the ones that truly stood out in every category.

Smartphones

Best smartphone overall: iPhone 13 (starting at $699; apple.com)

Apple’s iPhone has long been …

CNN Underscored is constantly testing products — be it coffee makers or office chairs — to find the absolute best in each respective category.

Our testing process is rigorous, consisting of hours of research (consulting experts, reading editorial reviews and perusing user ratings) to find the top products in each category. Once we settle on a testing pool, we spend weeks — if not months — testing and retesting each product multiple times in real-world settings. All this in an effort to settle on the absolute best products.

This year, we tested hundreds of home products — from office furniture to vacuums …

Throughout the year, CNN Underscored is constantly testing products — from coffee makers to computers to sheets to shower heads — to help our readers find the absolute best things.

Our testing process is rigorous. We spend countless hours of research, consulting experts, reading editorial reviews and perusing user ratings to identify the products we want to bring in for testing, be they things that have stood the test of time or the most promising new contenders. Then we spend weeks or months testing and retesting each product multiple times in real-world settings, putting everything through the sort of use …

Two new preprint papers add to growing evidence that the Omicron coronavirus variant may be less likely to cause severe disease and hospitalization compared to the Delta variant.

Omicron is associated with a two-thirds reduction in the risk of Covid-19 hospitalization compared with Delta, suggests one study, released online Wednesday as a working paper by researchers at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. That research was based out of Scotland.

The other paper, posted Tuesday to the online server medrxiv.org, suggests that people with Omicron infections have had 80% lower odds of being admitted to the hospital compared with Delta infections. But once …

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New York City will scale back the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration as the Omicron variant spreads, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Thursday, the same day New York state reported its highest recorded daily coronavirus case total ever.

The mayor added that officials were still monitoring the situation and could take additional precautions in the coming days, if …

The risks here for older people are frightening: A rate of 0.45 percent, for instance, translates into roughly a 1 in 220 chance of death for a vaccinated 75-year-old woman who contracts Covid. If the risks remain near these levels with Omicron, they could lead to tens of thousands of U.S. deaths, and many more hospitalizations.

Encouragingly, there are reasons to believe that Omicron’s death rate may be lower. Three new studies released yesterday suggested that Omicron causes milder illness on average than earlier versions of the virus. “I would guess that the mortality risk with Omicron is much smaller” …

Muttur Devi, a lower caste woman who works on a farm in the impoverished state of Bihar, adopted Christianity two years ago. Still, each morning, she affixes a bindi, a small circular sticker, to her forehead, and paints a vermilion stripe on her scalp. These are visible Hindu marks that she says help disguise her departure from Hinduism.

“If I take this off,” she said, touching her bindi, “the whole village will harass me.”

One cold night this past winter, Pastor Patil drove to a secret prayer session in an unmarked farmhouse. He quickly stepped inside. On a dusty carpet …