Director of films with one word titles like as Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron is aiming to accomplish something noteworthy that doesn’t involve an Oscar, actors, or even vaguely cat-lookin’ aliens; he’s going to venture to the ocean’s deepest depths. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll find some aliens. The glowing purple and pink kind, not the cat-lookin’ ones. The spot he’s trying to reach, appropriately named Challenger Deep, is part of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific and the deepest known point in the world’s oceans.

Minecraft has already proven itself to be a surprisingly robust platform for tinkerers to create computers and even games within the game world itself. Now, Minecraft experts Rezz and Psycho_ewt have brought us Gem Collector, a shockingly robust maze game built entirely inside Minecraft. In the game, the player moves around an enormous NES-style controller, which moves the player on the screen. Gems are collected, lives are lost, and sound effects are played. It’s amazing to watch, but it will surely make all of your own Minecraft creations seem a little lacking.

Read on after the break for a full list of the components behind this gargantuan game.

A team of researchers has announced that they may be able to drill through the Earth’s crust and study the molten mantle region before the end of the decade. Readers may recall from their childhood readings of The Magic Schoolbus Goes Inside The Earth, that the mantle is the region below the crust we live on and the and outside the Earth’s outer core.

The obvious question is why anyone would want to drill down into a living hell of molten rock, but science can answer for itself. From Cosmos magazine:

By extracting samples of the mantle, which is nearly 3,000 km thick and contains roughly 68% of the planet’s mass, researchers hope to unearth valuable information about its composition that could yield clues about the evolution of the planet. It could also contribute to our understanding of how the ocean crust is formed, the nature of the crust-mantle boundary and the limits of microbial life under the Earth’s surface.

While researchers have been able to study material from the mantle forced to the surface, such samples are believed to be inherently different than material in the mantle itself. By tapping into the earth’s molten inner-layer, the material can be studied in situ — a first in human history.

While the drilling is technically feasible, it is still fraught with difficulties.

Using paper cut outs and a standard digital camera, Wolfgang Matzl creates this highly truncated version of Inception. Despite the limited time and production, the cartoon still has some of the visual tricks of the source material. The opening, showing an unfolding building, is particularly clever.

But my favorite part has to be the deadpan dialogue. “Oh, wait a minute. I still have to finish this job. In my dream.”

(via Cartoon Brew)

Like Inception itself, this video has spawned nothing but argument, with some pointing out that it isn’t correct because the footage from the deeper dreams doesn’t always move faster than the footage from the dreams above them.  The easy answer is that there isn’t enough footage from some of the dreams to make each segment rush by at their actual speed.

The other flaw brought up is that there are actually five timelines, not four: the video omits footage of the extractors in reality.  Creator weikang explains that there simply weren’t enough shots of them sleeping on the plane to put it in.

And it would have made the video six or seven hours long.

Note: Obviously, if you haven’t already seen Inception, somehow, there are serious spoilers here.

(via Reddit, totally the best comment thread here.)

It’s these kind of questions that keep us up at night.

(via Neatorama.)

We called it: Though it’s a few months after Inceptionmania swept the Internet and our personal lives, the Inception TV plot is now a thing, as we saw on last night’s episode of South Park. Come for the South Park-style Cobb, Arthur, Yusuf, et al.: Stay for the randomly beatboxed Hans Zimmer Inception theme.

Last night’s Simpsons season premiere opened with an Inception-themed blackboard.

Side note: (h/t Susana) Will this be the season that we start seeing Inception plots of multi-leveled dream entry and intrigue on TV sitcoms? It could be awesome on shows like Futurama and South Park if it was done well; Two and a Half Men, not so much.

Previously.

(via TDW)

Ever since Inception hit theaters in July and inspired a sea of memes, scads of convoluted theories, and countless “we need to go deeper” jokes, countless nerds have yearned for an Inception video game, even as the prospect of a bungled gaming cash-in has filled them with dread. Now, the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, has said that an Inception game could be in the works.

Yo dawg, Blizzard heard you like timesinks. So they put a timesink in your timesink so you can timesink while you timesink.

Seriously.

The latest dose of beta content to hit the Cataclysm servers has included some things long awaited, and some surprises. To the surprises, add that in the updated Hillsbrad foothills area of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, there are a series of quests that walk you through several games of Plants vs. Zombies Peacebloom vs. Ghouls.