With more than 240 million copies sold over the last decade, Minecraft is among the bestselling games of all time. And more than just mobs and creating your own virtual playground, it’s imparting valuable lessons, especially for younger generations.
"It's a way that a whole generation — actually more than one generation now — has learned computer-aided design and realized that you can design worlds in this game but you can redesign the world in which we live in, also," said Liberty Science Center CEO Paul Hoffman.
The team at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., is hoping that by drawing in fans of the game with its Minecraft: The Exhibition, it can also bring in new fans to the STEM fields. It’s especially hoping it can draw in young women to pick up careers in these categories.
"I think the open-endedness of the game appeals to girls," Hoffman said. "It appeals to boys too. But I think that the fact that it taps different kinds of creativity, artistic creativity, problem-solving creativity."
STEM careers made up 7 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2019, according to the U.S. census, and are among the highest-paying jobs. But even though women make up 48 percent of all employees, they only account for 27 percent of STEM workers. With women struggling to return to the workforce amid the pandemic, some are concerned the gap could widen.
"We don't want to continue income disparity between males and females," Hoffman said.
In addition to the Minecraft exhibition, Liberty is highlighting achievements made by both sexes in its Genius Awards and other displays. It also brings in working female STEM professionals to show girls what is possible.
"There are those ladies who have invested their time, energy, effort, and broken down those walls, and they need to be celebrated and known for what they've done," Liberty Science Center director of STEM education Rosa Catala-Steidle said “The second part is translating that to the girls so that they can see these role models."
Catala-Steidel believes many young girls are into STEM careers when they are younger, but somewhere along the way, they get discouraged. As a child, Catala-Steidel wanted to be a veterinarian. But after going through college, she realized her passion was still in the sciences, but toward early childhood education. She now works with Liberty’s program – as well as her own daughter – to encourage that STEM spark. On top of that, young women need to be shown how to overcome obstacles that they will face if they decide to pursue these jobs.
"It's very important for me to show her my passion," she explained. "But it's also very important for me to show her the failures because if I give up, then she has a reason to give up because that's the modeling that I am doing. But if I persist, if I find different pathways, then that's a modeling technique of how to try to solve problems or get around barriers."
Catala-Steidel believes it’s important to show different opportunities, like working with animals for those with a nurturing nature or showing how cars work for analytical minds.
"For me, it's very important for my daughter to not necessarily follow in my footsteps, but to be encouraged when she does decide to tinker with STEM facets," she added.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
