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.”

BOSTON — Harvard University for decades assumed it had a cheap copy of the Magna Carta in its collection, a stained and faded document it had purchased for less than $30.

But two researchers have concluded it has something much more valuable — a rare version from 1300 issued by Britain’s King Edward I.

The original Magna Carta established in 1215 the principle that the king is subject to law, and it has formed the basis of constitutions globally. There are four copies of the original and, until now, there were believed to be only six copies of the 1300 version.

“My reaction was one of amazement and, in a way, awe that I should have managed to find a previously unknown Magna Carta,” said David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London. He was searching the Harvard Law School Library website in December 2023 when he found the digitized document.

“First, I’d found one of the most rare documents and most significant documents in world constitutional history,” Carpenter said. “But secondly, of course, it was astonishment that Harvard had been sitting on it for all these years without realizing what it was.”

Confirming the document’s authenticity

Carpenter teamed up with Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at Britain’s University of East Anglia, to confirm the authenticity of Harvard’s document.

Comparing it to the other six copies from 1300, Carpenter found the dimensions matched up. He and Vincent then turned to images Harvard librarians created using ultraviolet light and spectral imaging. The technology helps scholars see details on faded documents that are not visible to the human eye.

That allowed them to compare the texts word-for-word, as well as the handwriting, which include a large capital ‘E’ at the start in ‘Edwardus’ and elongated letters in the first line.

After the 1215 original printed by King John, five other editions were written in the following decades — until 1300, the last time the full document was set out and authorized by the king’s seal.

The 1300 version of Magna Carta is “different from the previous versions in a whole series of small ways and the changes are found in every single one,” Carpenter said.

Harvard had to meet a high bar to prove authenticity, Carpenter said, and it did so “with flying colors.”

Its tattered and faded copy of the Magna Carta is worth millions of dollars, Carpenter estimated — though Harvard has no plans to sell it. A 1297 version of the Magna Carta sold at auction in 2007 for $21.3 million.

A document with a colorful history

The other mystery behind the document was the journey it took to Harvard.

That task was left to Vincent, who was able to trace it all the way back to the former parliamentary borough of Appleby in Westmorland, England.

The Harvard Law School library purchased its copy in 1946 from a London book dealer for $27.50. At the time, it was wrongly dated as being made in 1327.

Vincent determined the document was sent to a British auction house in 1945 by a World War I flying ace who also played a role defending Malta in World War II. The war hero, Forster Maynard, inherited the archives from Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners against the slave trade. One of them, Thomas Clarkson, became friends with William Lowther, hereditary lord of the manor of Appleby, and he possibly gave it to Clarkson.

“There’s a chain of connection there, as it were, a smoking gun, but there isn’t any clear proof as yet that this is the Appleby Magna Carta. But it seems to me very likely that it is,” Vincent said. He said he would like to find a letter or other documentation showing the Magna Carta was given to Thomas Clarkson.

Making Magna Carta relevant for a new generation

Vincent and Carpenter plan to visit Harvard in June to see its Magna Carta firsthand — and they say the document is as relevant as ever at a time when Harvard is clashing with the Trump administration over how much authority the federal government should have over its leadership, admissions and activism on campus.

“It turns up at Harvard at precisely the moment where Harvard is under attack as a private institution by a state authority that seems to want to tell Harvard what to do,” Vincent said.

It also is a chance for a new generation to learn about the Magna Carta, which played a part in the founding of the United States — from the Declaration of Independence to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Seventeen states have incorporated aspects of it into their laws.

“We think of law libraries as places where people can come and understand the underpinnings of democracy,” said Amanda Watson, the assistant dean for library and information services at Harvard Law School. “To think that Magna Carta could inspire new generations of people to think about individual liberty and what that means and what self-governance means is very exciting.”