Tracy Chou launched the Twitter app Block Party in 2021 to help users escape targeted harassment campaigns that she--as an Asian American woman--knew from personal experience could ostracize vulnerable voices from the public conversation. But on Wednesday Block Party closed its doors, becoming the latest victim of soaring new bills imposed by a struggling Twitter under new owner Elon Musk. Under Twitter's former ownership, Chou struck a deal with the company for free access to data--a win-win arrangement that would allow Block Party to grow and provide Twitter with a valuable anti-harassment tool to which it didn't have to devote expensive engineering time. But Chou tells TIME that following the recent expiration of that contract, Twitter wanted Block Party to pay $42,000 per month for access to enough data to keep the app running. There was no way Block Party could afford the figure, she says.

With lockdown entering its fifth week, Minecraft is proving a useful venue for friends and families to meet up, play together and work on collaborative projects. The game is widely used in schools throughout the world to teach everything from sustainable farming to the history of art, and Microsoft recently made the many lessons and exercises in its Minecraft Education programme available to everyone with an Office 365 account. If you have the game at home and are looking for new projects to attempt – maybe as part of your home schooling timetable – here are eight ideas that will test and expand your modelling skills. And we'd love to see how you get on! We'll run a gallery of our favourite examples.

The humble game of Jenga has become the latest human pursuit to fall to machines, scientists have announced. In what marks significant progress for robotic manipulation of real-world objects, a Jenga-playing machine can learn the complex physics involved in withdrawing wooden blocks from a tower through physical trial and error. This differentiates it from robots that have mastered purely cognitive games such as chess and Go through visual cues. "Playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing and aligning pieces," said Prof Alberto Rodriguez from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Combining interactive perception and manipulation – whereby the robot would touch the tower to learn how and when to move blocks – is extremely difficult to simulate and therefore the robot has to learn in the real world, he added.