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Tag: World Records

  • Loudest Stadium Award Goes To….. Arrowhead Stadium!

    For all of you NFL enthusiasts, the official numbers are definitely in! This time, there’s no doubt about it that the award for the loudest NFL stadium goes to Arrowhead Stadium.

    Home of the Kansas City Chiefs, Arrowhead Stadium reached new heights on Sunday as fans roared in the final minutes of the game in wake of a momentous 24-7 victory over the Oakland Raiders. With an undefeated 6-0 record this season, devout Chiefs’ fans definitely have something to roar about. They turned up the volume, reaching a 137.5 decibel peak of sound in the final minutes of the game.

    According to Guinness World Records, the record-breaking feat was actually accomplished when fans broke the 136.6 decibel sound barrier. That particular record was set earlier this season by Seattle Seahawk fans during the Seahawks-49ers game.

    NBC Sports puts the magnitude of the sound level into perspective, stating that the noise is actually comparable to ‘a jet engine at 100 feet, which is about 140 decibels.’

    The Chiefs fans, in conjunction with the team organization, have been accredited for the collaborated effort. The organization shelled out approximately $7,500 to bring in a Guinness adjudicator. Ironically, the adjudicator was Guinness official, Philip Robertson, who was actually on site for the Seahawks decibel record earlier this season. Robertson also weighed in on how the experience felt to him. “They destroyed any Premier League hopes of attaining this record, I can tell you that, and I’m a Brit that loves the Premier League. It was extraordinary,” said Robertson.

    Chiefs head coach, Andy Reid stated that he actually ‘felt the ground shaking.’ It was also noted that the roaring sounds also shook the stadium press box as well. Ground shaking is definitely befitting for the experience overall.


    Image via Twitter | Kansas City Chiefs

  • NASA’s Cosmic Ray-Detecting Balloon Breaks Records

    NASA’s Cosmic Ray-Detecting Balloon Breaks Records

    A NASA balloon has broken the record for longest flight. The balloon, which carries the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (Super-TIGER), spent 55 days, 1 hour, and 34 minutes circling the South Pole at 127,000 feet – over four times the altitude of commercial airplanes. The previous record for a balloon of that size was 46 days.

    The record-breaking balloon also broke the record for longest flight of a heavy-lift scientific balloon, beating the previous record (set by NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon in 2009) by five minutes.

    “This is an outstanding achievement for NASA’s Astrophysics balloon team,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “Keeping these huge balloons aloft for such long periods lets us do forefront science that would be difficult to do otherwise.”

    The balloon was held aloft by wind patterns at the South pole. Anticyclonic winds that circulate from east to west in the stratosphere there enable long-duration balloon flights.

    The Super-TIGER instrument aboard the balloon measured rare elements heavier than iron in the cosmic rays that constantly strike the Earth’s atmosphere. The data will be used to research the origins of the particles and how they reach their high energy states. Researchers estimate the device detected 50 million cosmic rays, and that the data will take around two years to fully analyze.

    “This has been a very successful flight because of the long duration, which allowed us to detect large numbers of cosmic rays,” said Bob Binns, principal investigator of the Super-TIGER mission. “The instrument functioned very well.”

  • Felix Baumgartner’s Freefall Video And Its Lego Counterpart

    On Sunday, Felix Baumgartner broke the sound barrier, and set world records as he jumped from outer space to the Earth below. The event was the result of five years of preparation, and Baumgartner now holds the records for highest jump from a platform (128,100 feet), longest distance freefall (119,846 feet), and maximum vertical velocity (833.9 mph, Mach 1.24).

    Watch this:

    The whole thing was livestreamed on YouTube.

    “At peak, you were watching more than 8 million concurrent livestreams of this mission, which intended to break 50-year old records of human limits and break new ground in medical and scientific research,” says YouTube Sports Partnerships Manager Tim Katz.

    Here’s a bit more background on the jump from YouTube’s blog:

    The 120,000 foot jump over Roswell, New Mexico is the culmination of over five years of work by Felix and the Red Bull Stratos mission team, who are now prepared to break the 102,800 ft record set by US Air Force legend, Col. Joe Kittinger 52 years ago. After rising in a capsule propelled by 30 million cubic feet of helium, Felix will jump from 23 miles above Roswell, New Mexico. You’ll see a live data feed that will show exactly where Felix is in the sky, his rate of speed during the freefall, and how high above earth he is throughout the entire flight. You’ll also be able to hear Felix’s conversations with Col. Kittinger who will be the only voice from Mission Control advising Felix.

    Luckily, the whole thing was reenacted with LEGOs (h/t: The Daily What). Here’s that:

  • Watch 138 People Break The World Skydiving Record

    Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and Gabby Douglas aren’t the only people setting records through amazing physical achievements. In an effort that took over three days, nearly a gross of skydivers took to the skies over Ottawa, Illinois to break the world record in vertical skydiving.

    138 divers, to be exact. The previous record was 108, and people traveled from all over the world – France, Sweden, Ukraine, Italy, Russia, and more – to participate.

    Over the course of the three days, the 138 skydivers attempted the mid-air feat 15 times before getting it right. The divers jumped from 18,500 feet and formed a snowflake formation, all while falling at speeds or up to 220 mph.

    Check it out below:

  • World’s Largest Rube Goldberg Machine Pops Balloon In Just 300 Steps

    I’m a big fan of Rube Goldberg machines. There’s just a level of excitement and conversely calm and comfort that comes over me when I watch one function successfully. I guess since so much of my life is punctuated by actions that boil complex tasks down to a simple mechanic – the click of a button, the turn of a car key, etc – it’s oddly refreshing to see the opposite in action. Making something so simple into an incredibly complex series of mechanical happenings just gets me all giddy.

    And this latest attempt by The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers doesn’t disappoint.

    According to the World Records Academy, what you’re about to see is the new official world record holder for largest Rube Goldberg machine – in terms of number of steps. Below, 300 steps are required to achieve the goal, which just happens to be the inflation and popping of a balloon.

    In order to get so many steps into the relatively small space of the machine, they came up with that impressive spinning wheel of stages.

    The team spent more than 5,000 hours constructing the machine that accomplished every task ever assigned in the competition’s 25-year history, including peeling an apple, juicing an orange, toasting bread, making a hamburger, changing a light bulb, loading a CD and sharpening a pencil.

    Packing so many steps into one machine required inventing a novel platform that consisted of two rotating paddlewheels that revealed new sets of modules to chronologically accomplish a quarter century worth of tasks.

    Check it out below:

    This machine broke the old world record, held by – The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers. Last year, they jumped into the record books with a Rube Goldberg device with 244 steps. This year’s device blows that one out of the water.

    [h/t Gizmodo]

  • Zappos Sets World Record For Simultaneous High-Fives

    Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon in late 2009, has set a new Guinness World Record for the most people high-fiving simultaneously.

    This was accomplished on March 5th at 7:14 pm PST, during the second half of the West Coast Conference (WCC) Men’s Championship game at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. The new record set by Zappos is 3,504. Prior to that, it was 2,176.

    “We’ve broken many different retailer records over the years, but I can honestly say that being part of a Guinness World Records event really reinforces our core value of ‘creating fun and a little weirdness,’” said Matt Burchard, Sr. Director of Marketing, Zappos.com. “Bringing all of the fans together to participate and share in the record-breaking attempt during the WCC championships is definitely something that will long live in Zappos infamy. It’s been really fun and exciting to create a sense of community and camaraderie at the game.”

    (image)

    Zappos was a sponsor for the game (actually, it has been for the past 4 years). Fans were given wristbands as they entered the arena, and the mascots and cheerleaders worked with the crowd on how to do the high-five “properly”.

    The Guinness World Records Adjudicator was there to make sure the whole thing was legit.

    lead image: NBC’s Seinfeld

  • “World Record For Largest Observed Snowflake” Google Doodle Puzzles The Web

    Yesterday, Google ran an interesting, animated doodle for its logo, celebrating the 125th anniversary of the world record for largest observed snowflake. As I asked, in my article about it, where does Google come up with this stuff?

    A lot of others were wondering the same thing. For example, here are a couple of the comments we got:

    “So how exactly did u get the recording of its size without making it melt?”

    “Someone could have bulls**tted the whole story with a made up sketch, fake measurements and false claims. You dont know, i dont know, theres no telling if this even really happened….”

    According to Wikipedia, which Google presented as the top organic result when clicking on the doodle, in the snowflake was observed in 1887 at 38 centimeters (15 in) in diameter in Fort Keogh, Montana.

    The Wikipedia entry cites: Lyons, Walter A (1997). The Handy Weather Answer Book (2nd ed.). Detroit, Michigan: Visible Ink press. ISBN 0-7876-1034-8.

    I dug up a New York Times article from 2007, which references the same snowflake, noting that it’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, and that the snowflake was measured by a nearby rancher, who described the flakes falling in the storm which produced the flake in question, as “larger than milk pans”. It also says that there was no corroborating evidence to support the rancher’s claim.

    I’m having a hard time finding anything about the record on Guinness’ site, but here are some other interesting snow-related records.

    Here’s an interesting excerpt from that NYT article:

    “Who of us has seen a hailstone the size of a golf ball or a baseball?” asked Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a snowflake devotee at the California Institute of Technology who runs the physics department there in his spare time. “But, clearly, they exist, because people pull them out of their freezers. Some of these things can be very, very rare, but not impossible.”

    So too with giant snowflakes, Dr. Libbrecht said. “As big as a basketball?” he asked. “Who knows? It’s not out of the question.”

    The laws of physics, he said, suggest no obvious restrictions on the size of very large flakes. But in the real world, Dr. Libbrecht added, wind might break up the fragile compilations, putting an effective size limit on what flutters down from the sky.

    @GoogleDoodles
    Google Doodles    We couldn’t flake on this one… http://t.co/fZ43U15m 21 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    tagSEOBlog uploaded the following video demonstrating the animation (hat tip to Barry Schwartz):

  • Ndamukong Suh Tweetup Aims to Break Guinness World Record

    Ndamukong Suh Tweetup Aims to Break Guinness World Record

    Detroit Lions Defensive Tackle Ndamukong Suh announced via Twitter and TwitVid that he is setting out to lead the world’s largest tweetup this weekend, to break the current Guinness World Record.

    Suh calls upon fans to join him Saturday at 10:30 AM, before the Nebraska (his Alma mater) Spring game.

    “Let’s crush that Guinness World record,” he tells his followers.

    @ndamukong_suh
    Ndamukong Suh    In case you missed my #SUHTweetup #twitvid http://twitvid.com/EWEGO
    Stay tuned,tomorrow I will announce my first Twitter Contest!
    #SUHSQUAD 12 hours ago via Twitterrific · powered by @socialditto

    Who holds the current record? None other than well-known (at least in social media marketing crowds) Ford social media guy Scott Monty. According to the Guinness World Records site, “The most attendees at a ‘Tweetup’ is 1,149 and was achieved by Ford Motor Company (USA) in Los Angeles, California, USA, on 1 December 2009.”

    WebProNews has interviewed Monty a couple times about Ford’s social media success:

    It’s even more interesting considering that the Lions are owned by William Clay Ford, grandson of Henry Ford and son of Edsel Ford. I would almost wonder if Monty wasn’t somehow involved with this, if it wasn’t more about Nebraska than the Lions.

    Tip of the hat to the Detroit Free Press.

    Full disclosure: I’m a huge fan of Suh’s and a loyal fan of the Detroit Lions.