A team from St. Olaf College won the 25th annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on Saturday at Purdue University by creating a machine that inflated and popped a balloon to musical accompaniment.
A team from Purdue University placed second in the contest with a machine that took 300 steps to inflate and pop a balloon. That apparently breaks the Guinness World Record for the most steps by a Rube Goldberg machine, a mark set by the same Purdue team in last year’s competition. Here is this year’s record-setting machine at work.
In non-Rube Goldberg news, Zorro saved the day last month in a chemistry classroom at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the professor gamely played along.
Stephen Colbert unveiled a do-it-yourself Super PAC starter kit last week on The Colbert Report in response to a letter from a student at the University of Texas at Austin.
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