Month: November 2024

Block zombies are on the attack in Minecraft Movie trailer

Where “anything you can imaging is possible—as long as what you imagine can be built out of blocks.”

Jack Black stars as Steve in A Minecraft Movie.

The first teaser for A Minecraft Movie released in September to some decidedly mixed reactions, particularly concerning the CGI and character design and especially Jason Momoa's hair. And yes, there were many ridiculous memes. We were inclined to give it a chance based on the casting of Momoa and Jack Black. Now the full trailer has dropped, and honestly, odd design choices aside—and they are indeed odd—it looks like a perfectly acceptable fun family film and not much more, albeit very light on actual plot.

As previously reported, once the film went into development, Jared Hess (who worked with star Jack Black on Nacho Libre) ended up directing. The COVID pandemic and 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike delayed things further, but filming finally wrapped earlier this year in Auckland, New Zealand—just in time for a spring 2025 theatrical release. Per the official premise:

Welcome to the world of Minecraft, where creativity doesn’t just help you craft, it’s essential to one’s survival! Four misfits—Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks)—find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they’ll have to master this world (and protect it from evil things like Piglins and Zombies, too) while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected, expert crafter, Steve (Jack Black). Together, their adventure will challenge all five to be bold and to reconnect with the qualities that make each of them uniquely creative… the very skills they need to thrive back in the real world.

Game players will recognize Steve as one of the default characters in Minecraft. The teaser was set to The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" and showed our misfits encountering a fantastical Tolkien-esque landscape—only with a lot more cube-like shapes, like a pink sheep with a cubed head.

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Yi Peng 3: Chinesisches Schiff war nahe der durchtrennten Seekabel

Die Yi Peng 3 war in der Nähe der Stelle, an der die beiden Glasfaser-Seekabel BCS East-West und C-Lion1 durchtrennt wurden. Beweise für eine Sabotage gibt es keine. (Seekabel, Glasfaser)

Die Yi Peng 3 war in der Nähe der Stelle, an der die beiden Glasfaser-Seekabel BCS East-West und C-Lion1 durchtrennt wurden. Beweise für eine Sabotage gibt es keine. (Seekabel, Glasfaser)

Räumliche Intelligenz: Niantic trainiert KI mit Geodaten

Räumliches Verständnis ist laut Niantic die nächste Herausforderung für KI-Modelle. Die Rohdaten dafür liefern Spieler von Ingress und Pokemon-Go. (Niantic, KI)

Räumliches Verständnis ist laut Niantic die nächste Herausforderung für KI-Modelle. Die Rohdaten dafür liefern Spieler von Ingress und Pokemon-Go. (Niantic, KI)

Räumliche Intelligenz: Niantic trainiert KI mit Geodaten

Räumliches Verständnis ist laut Niantic die nächste Herausforderung für KI-Modelle. Die Rohdaten dafür liefern Spieler von Ingress und Pokemon-Go. (Niantic, KI)

Räumliches Verständnis ist laut Niantic die nächste Herausforderung für KI-Modelle. Die Rohdaten dafür liefern Spieler von Ingress und Pokemon-Go. (Niantic, KI)

Cracking the recipe for perfect plant-based eggs

Hint: It involves finding exactly the right proteins.

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food—and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.

So food scientists, and a few companies, are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse-engineer an egg,” says David Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

That’s not easy, because real eggs play so many roles in the kitchen. You can use beaten eggs to bind breadcrumbs in a coating, or to hold together meatballs; you can use them to emulsify oil and water into mayonnaise, scramble them into an omelet or whip them to loft a meringue or angel food cake. An all-purpose egg substitute must do all those things acceptably well, while also yielding the familiar texture and—perhaps—flavor of real eggs.

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