Weird Science Weekly: It’s humans vs Lego in Rubik’s Cube world record battle

Science is very cool and incredibly important, but sometimes it can get pretty weird. In this installment of WSW, we're looking at some of the strangest science stories that have come out over the past week, like record-smashing Lego robots, rebuilding a man's face through 3D printing, and the mysteries behind contagious yawning...

Lego wins latest bout in the battle for Rubik's Cube supremacy

For a few years now, there's been a secret war going on between humans and robots. No, The Matrix isn't real ... this is about Lego proving, yet again, that it is the coolest and most awesome toy on the planet.

Back in 2011, Lego robot Cubestormer II set a new world record for the fastest time solving a Rubik's Cube — 5.352 seconds — just barely beating the time set by Dutch human Mats Valk, who had clocked in at 5.66 seconds at the time. Valk came back in 2013 to set a new human record, with a time of 5.55 seconds, but as the video above shows, this newest cube-solving Lego robot, Cubestormer III, didn't just surpass that record by a tiny margin this time. It destroyed it, solving the cube in just 3.253 seconds!

Fortunately for Valk, human and robot records are kept separately, so his time still stands. However, the designers of Cubestormer III, engineers David Gilday and Mike Dobson (who worked on the robot in their spare time) are looking into ways of making Cubestormer even faster. The key for it to work is making the custom-made smartphone app guide the Lego Mindstorm motors with precision timing. One mistimed step and the cube jams, sending Lego pieces exploding all over the room. They're up for the challenge, though, and it seems that future Cubestormers could leave the human records even further behind. Check out these other videos, showing other Lego robots, run by similar applications, solving a 4x4x4 cube and even a 9x9x9 cube. Understandably, they take a little longer to solve, but it's no less impressive!

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Man's face is rebuilt using 3D-printed parts

Back in 2012, Stephen Power suffered a motorcycle accident that left his face shattered. However, using 3D printing technology, doctors have actually completely reconstructed the left side of his face and jaw. Warning: The video contains some disturbing images.

They weren't able to get that side of his face to completely match up, but according to The Telegraph, that wasn't due to a limitation of the technology or the technique. Since his left eye was damaged in the accident and his vision in that eye was recovering, his ophthalmologists asked the surgeons not to do anything that might disrupt the healing process.

When 3D printing was first invented, it had huge potential for industry. However, recent advances have shown that this technology is going far beyond just creating machine parts. Maybe, perhaps someday sooner than we think, we may be able to put aside the idea of building cyborg bodies to extend our lifespan, and 3D print completely new biological bodies for ourselves instead.

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As much as we do it, yawning still remains a mystery

Did you, by chance, yawn when you read the title of this section, or maybe just have the urge to yawn? For some people it takes seeing another person yawn or hearing the sound of a yawn to get them going, but for others it only takes thinking about it to cause that involuntary inhalation. That's what's known as contagious yawning.

We know plenty about yawning itself, and have even figured out new reasons for exactly what yawning does for us (see the video below). However, exactly why we we feel the overwhelming urge to yawn when someone else does it remains a mystery.

The video says that yawning has been linked to empathy, but while there's evidence for that, a recent study is saying that might not actually be the case.

Researchers at Duke University had study participants answer a questionnaire to test their empathy, along with other factors like energy level and sleepiness, and then had them watch a 3-minute video of people yawning. Recording how many times the participants yawned in response, they found no particular connection to any of the factors in the questionnaire. The only significant factor that played a role was the participants' age — the older they were, the less likely they were to yawn due to the video — but even that didn't show a very strong relation. It was just the only factor that showed any relation that couldn't be explained by chance alone.

Looks like they're going to have to keep working on this one. Just goes to show how weird our brains are. Here: check out ASAP Science's Yawn-O-Meter to see how long you last...

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Keep your eyes on the wonders of science, and if you spot anything particularly strange you'd like me to check out for next week, comment below, email me using the link in the banner above, or drop me a line on Twitter!

(Videos courtesy: ARM, BBC News, ASAP Science)

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