How Schools Are Working to Reduce the STEM Divide for Black Students

Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
A look at OpenAI’s Minecraft bot, which has learned to complete complex tasks in Minecraft after being trained on 70K hours of video of people playing the game  —  Online videos are a vast and untapped source of training data—and OpenAI says it has a new way to use it.

Neirin Gray Desai / Rest of World:
How Minecraft’s ban on NFTs impacted the play-to-earn Critterz NFT community, some of whom bought in for thousands of dollars and earned hundreds per month  —  Kids in the Philippines were earning hundreds of dollars from a play-to-earn Minecraft game, until new rules sent the community into a tailspin.

Sabrina Ortiz / ZDNet:
Google signs a cooperative research and development agreement with the NIST to develop new nanotechnology and semiconductor devices with open-source designs  —  Chips used to develop new nanotechnology and semiconductor devices oftentimes have a large price tag, posing a big obstacle for innovation.

April Rubin / New York Times:
An interview with YouTuber Christopher Slayton, aka ChrisDaCow, on building the entire observable universe in Minecraft over nearly two months  —  Christopher Slayton, 18, spent two months intricately designing the planets.  He even went skydiving to get a better appreciation for Earth.

Amanda Holpuch / New York Times:
Cybercrime in gaming has increased substantially since the start of the pandemic, with threats lurking in cheat codes, microtransactions, and players’ messages  —  Cybersecurity experts warn that threats lurk in cheat codes, microtransactions and messages from fellow players.