Watch this teen break the world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube – in just 5.25 seconds
Collin Burns completed the puzzle in 5.25 seconds. Lucky for us, someone caught the moment on video.
Burns
was participating in an official World Cube Association competition at a
high school in Doylestown, Pa., on Saturday. The previous record, set
by Mats Valk from the Netherlands, was 5.5 seconds. A WCA representative
confirmed to Mashable that Burns is indeed the new record holder.
“Although
this result has not been uploaded to the WCA database just yet, we can
confirm that this is (or will be soon) the new official WCA world record
for the 3x3x3 single solve category. To our best knowledge, it has been
performed in an official competition, with all the rules being
followed, even the scramble has been checked for its correctness,” the
spokesperson said.
Want some tips from the new world record holder on how to solve the puzzle? He’s got them on his YouTube page.
Collin Burns - US Rubik's Cube Champion 2014 (Table Cam)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmgm5j9dNfA
Collin Burns - 5.93 Official Rubik's Cube Solve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIVN0SOYwwU
Rubik's Cube World Record 5.25 sec Collin Burns Slow Motion
What Constant Exposure To Negative News Is Doing To Our Mental Health
It's nearly impossible to turn on the TV, open up a web browser, or scroll through Twitter without being assaulted with notifications of a new world disaster (or two, or three...). Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, alerts of shootings, plane crashes, ISIS beheadings, crime, war and human rights violations are constant -- and this incessant news of violence and destruction may be messing with our heads.
"Terrorism is newsworthy because it is inherently dramatic and threatening," political scientist Shana Gadarian wrote in The Washington Post in October. "Media competition means that journalists and editors have incentives to use emotionally powerful visuals and story lines to gain and maintain ever-shrinking news audiences."This may be driven partly by ournatural negativity bias, which leads us to pay more attention to things that are dangerous or threatening.
According to some psychologists, exposure to negative and violent media may have serious and long-lasting psychological effects beyond simple feelings of pessimism or disapproval. The work of British psychologist Dr. Graham Davey, who specializes in the psychological effects of media violence, suggests that violent media exposure can exacerbate or contribute to the development of stress, anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"Negative news can significantly change an individual’s mood -- especially if there is a tendency in the news broadcasts to emphasize suffering and also the emotional components of the story," Davey told The Huffington Post. "In particular... negative news can affect your own personal worries. Viewing negative news means that you’re likely to see your own personal worries as more threatening and severe, and when you do start worrying about them, you’re more likely to find your worry difficult to control and more distressing than it would normally be."
According to Davey, the way that negative news affects your mood can also have a larger affect on how you interpret and interact with the world around you. If it makes you more anxious or sad for instance, then you may subconsciously become more attuned to negative or threatening events, and you may be more likely to see ambiguous or neutral events as negative ones.
On a neurological level, when we're confronted with images of violence, we know that images or videos depicting violence are categorically different from actual violence -- so we don't process the input as threatening stimuli. However, we internalize the negative stimuli, which can affect mood and cause one to feel more negatively towards the environment more broadly.
"These images change our overall mood to a more negative one -- more sad or more anxious -- and it is this change in mood that leads to psychological changes in the way we attend to things around us (e.g. we are more likely to pick out things in our environment that are potentially negative or threatening)," Davey explains. "This can have a vicious cycle effect on mood generally for some time."
Some research has even suggested that viewing traumatic images in the media can cause PTSD-like symptoms. A 2001 study found that watching the events of 9/11 on television was enough to trigger PTSD symptoms -- such as worrying about future terrorist attacks and reduced self-confidence -- in some viewers. Severity of symptoms, interestingly, was directly correlated with the amount of time the subjects spent watching television.
A recent study also found that being frequently exposed to graphic, uncensored images of violence is emotionally distressing to many journalists working in newsroom settings. The journalists who were regularly exposed to violent video footage scored higher on indexes of PTSD -- including re-experiencing, avoidance and general anxiety -- as well as increased alcohol consumption, depression, and somatization (physical signs of distress in the body).
The researchers noted that over time, exposure to graphic violence can cause a process of either sensitization, in which the individuals becomes more sensitive to emotional distress upon viewing the images, or desensitization -- a sort of numbing process in which individuals become habituated to what they see -- to occur. This numbing effect, which causes the brain to exhibit less of an emotional response to disturbing stimuli, has been observed in those who have been repeatedly exposed to violent video games.
The diagnostic criteria for PTSD -- which was appended for the DSM-5 to recognize that not only experiencing something traumatic oneself but also witness a life-threatening trauma to another could lead to symptoms of the disorder -- acknowledges this to some degree. Davey notes, however, that the DSM description does say that these events should be witnessed in person.
Of course, it's important to note that exposure to negative news is unlikely to cause depression, anxiety or PTSD in individuals who are not already prone to these conditions. But it can still lead to a pessimism and world-weariness that leads us to perceive the state of the world in an overly negative light -- leading us to ignore and overshadow the many things that are working.
What's clear from this research is that more positive news is needed to outweigh the violence and destruction we're exposed to every day. As psychologist Steven Pinker and international studies professor Andrew Mack write in Slate, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, despite what the headlines suggest. Violence has actuallydecreased, and quality of life has improved for millions of people. Journalism should reflect these truths.
As Positive News founder Sean Dagan Wood said in a recent TED talk, "A more positive form of journalism will not only benefit our well-being; it will engage us in society, and it will help catalyze potential solutions to the problems that we face."
There might be only 1,947 units of the 88 Tauri smartphone ever made, but each and every one of them is ridiculous. That’s the only way to describe Tonino Lamborghini’s $6,000 Android phone. With a stitched leather finish that’s the real deal (unlike a plastic Samsung) and gold-plated stainless steel surrounding this phone, you’re bound to stand out in the crowd if you’re crazy enough to even want to pay $6,000 for pure stupidity.
Tonino Lamborghini had two of the units here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, perfectly matching the city’s passion for excess. Once you get past the raging bull logo, inside there’s a 2.3 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, 3G of RAM, and 32GB storage. It’s all part of a 5-inch display running at 1920 x 1080, with a 20-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel shooter at the front. It’s not exactly a special smartphone inside, but that’s not the point. This phone is as insane and exquisite as a supercar, but it just doesn’t go from 0-60 mph in less than 5 seconds.
