WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Tuesday that the Democratic-controlled Maine House of Representatives cannot bar a Republican lawmaker from speaking in the chamber or voting as a result of comments she made about a transgender student-athlete.

In a brief order, the high court granted an emergency request from state Rep. Laurel Libby, who faced considerable blowback from a social media post in February after a transgender girl won a pole vault event at this year’s state championship.

“This is a win for free speech — and for the Constitution,” Libby said Tuesday on X, adding that she had been “silenced for speaking up for Maine girls.”

House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat, said in a statement that as a result of the decision, “Representative Libby’s ability to vote on the floor of the House has been restored until the current appeal process runs its course.”

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The Trump administration has offered Libby its support, with the Justice Department filing a brief in a federal appeals court. Litigation will now continue in that court.

Two of the court’s liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, disagreed with the outcome. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

Libby, a critic of the state’s policy to allow transgender athletes to compete in high school sports, posted a photo of the child athlete alongside a photo of the same student competing in the boys’ event in a previous year.

The House subsequently censured her.

The issue before the Supreme Court was not the censure but a separate punishment that barred Libby from speaking or voting in the House until she apologized.

As a result, Libby was unable to properly represent her constituents, leaving them without a voice in the Legislature, her lawyers argued. A group of voters joined Libby in filing suit.

They asked the Supreme Court to immediately allow her to participate in the current legislative session, which ends in June, arguing that the punishment violates her constituents’ voting rights under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Lower courts refused to intervene, saying legislative immunity barred her claims.

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said in court papers that the House’s actions constituted a “modest punishment” that merely required an apology, not that Libby recant her views.

In her dissenting opinion, Jackson said she did not think Libby had met the high bar required for the Supreme Court to intervene.

Among other things, Libby and her supporters had not shown that there are important votes coming up or any votes in which her participation was key to the outcomes, Jackson said.

While it is “certainly possible” that Libby would ultimately prevail on her legal arguments, the outcome was “not clear, let alone indisputably so,” she added.

Blink and you’ll miss it: A Purdue University student engineering team has built a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube in one-tenth of a second — faster than the average time it takes to blink an eye.

Their robot, called “Purdubik’s Cube,” set a Guinness World Record last month for the “fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube.” It successfully solved a mixed-up cube in just 0.103 seconds, a fraction of the previous record of 0.305 seconds, set by Mitsubishi Electric engineers in May 2024.

The robot, located on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, uses machine vision for color recognition, custom solving algorithms optimized for execution time and industrial-grade motion control hardware, according to a Purdue University press release.

The team, consisting of engineering students Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay and Alex Berta, initially created the robot to compete in the December 2024 Spark Challenge, a design competition for students in Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. After they won first place, they continued to improve the robot with sponsorship help from Purdue’s Institute for Control, Optimization and Networks.

The achievement isn’t all fun and games: Ultra-fast coordinated robotic systems like Purdubic’s Cube are already used in a variety of industries, including in manufacturing and packaging applications.

The Rubik’s Cube first become a cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, languished in the 1990s, and has enjoyed a surprise resurgence with the rise of the internet helping lead to speedcubing — competitions to see how fast people (and now machines) can solve the 3 x 3 puzzle.

People now regularly compete in events to solve Rubik’s Cubes in a variety of ways, even blindfolded. But the fastest person can’t come close to Purdue’s robot. The current human world record is held by Max Park, who solved a cube in 3.13 seconds in 2023.

New York University said it is withholding the diploma of a student who delivered an unapproved commencement speech to address what he called the “atrocities currently happening in Palestine” during the Israel-Hamas war.

The prestigious private university quickly condemned the speech delivered by student Logan Rozos on Wednesday.

“NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views,” the school said in a statement Wednesday.

Rozos told members of his graduating class that he had been “freaking out a lot” about his speech, but his “moral and political commitments guide me to say that the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine.”

The ceremony was livestreamed on the school’s website, but a recording of it is not yet available. Videos of Rozos’ speech were posted online.

The camera panned to show some of his fellow classmates clapping and cheering.

“I want to say that the genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months,” Rozos continued. “I do not wish to speak only to my own politics today, but to speak for all people of conscience, all people who feel the moral injury of this atrocity. And I want to say that I condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide.”

The camera panned again to show students clapping and standing.

The local Anti-Defamation League said it was “appalled” by the speech.

“We are thankful to the NYU administration for their strong condemnation and their pursuit of disciplinary action,” the ADL said in a post Thursday on X.

The university said Rozos “lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules.”

“The University is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions,” the school said. “NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.”