The world record attempt took place in Quebec, Canada. Check it out below (this was their second attempt):

According to the reddit poster, who says that they’re the second from the right in the video, they plan on getting Guinness involved:

“I wasn’t in charge of the whole thing, but I know that they want to try it again more officially next year. We were a bit last minute this year. But Guinness or not, I’m still pretty stoked about how well it worked!” they say.

World champion and future Olympic participant Mikael Kingsbury was a part of the jump, and tweeted about it:

We bet the world record !! 30 back flip hand in hand! Thanks to Mont St-Sauveur!

— Mikael Kingsbury (@MikaelKingsbury) April 14, 2013

[reddit, image via]

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.”

Wired recently visited Amanda Ghassaei, assistant tech editor at Instructables, where she is putting classic and contemporary albums on 3D printed records. She uses Objet’s Connex 500 printer to make the records due to the printer’s ability to print at high resolutions. That being said, the high resolution printing afforded by Objet’s printer is still at a lower resolution than what is required by traditional vinyl records.

Of course, the question now is whether or not the sound quality is any good. That’s a resounding no as the low resolution of the 3D printed records leads to a sound quality that’s about a quarter of the quality found in an MP3. Check it out for yourself below:

It’s a little disappointing, but 3D printers are only going to get better as the years go on. Soon or later, you’ll be able to make your own traditional records on a 3D printer. The record industry isn’t going to like it, but would they really try to ban 3D printers? I’m pretty sure plenty of people would like to see them try.

And while Spain was busy scoring goals late, putting and exclamation point on their win, people were tweeting their thumbs off. Yesterday’s match saw fans break the all-time Twitter record for tweets per second (sports related). According to the Twitter blog, global traffic peaked at 15,358 tweets per second as Spain scored their fourth goal.

That shatters the previous sports-related Twitter activity record of 12,233 recorded at this year’s Super Bowl. Before that, then-Denver Bronco QB Tim Tebow helped set the record at 9,420 when his team vanquished the Steelers with some overtime playoff heroics.

Overall, 16.5 million tweets rolled in throughout the course of the match.

Twitter also gives us a cool visualization of mentions of the top 16 teams throughout the tournament.

This data visualization shows how often people mentioned Europe’s top 16 national teams from the group stages through the final between Spain and Italy. You can see how often all of the teams were mentioned throughout the tournament and look at how mentions compare for competitors for each match. These different perspectives should give you a strong sense of how people reacted during the matches on Twitter. Look, for example, at the big spikes in Tweets that tend to occur during goals.

Did you watch the game? If not, you can check out some of the highlights and gooooaaaalllllls below:

Neither Microsoft or RedLynx have announced any monetary figures yet, but it’s not too hard to ballpark a figure. With the game selling for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15.00), it’s clear that over $1.5 million was raked in on Wednesday. That’s some fairly conclusive proof that smaller, more gameplay-oriented titles can still be successful on a large scale.

Trials Evolution was launched just two days ago and has become an instant hit. Reviews of the game are full of praise, including a review giving the game a perfect score from Giantbomb.

Reviewers cite several reasons for the success of Trials Evolution. The sequel maintains the challenge of the original Trials while adding a plethora of features. The game now features a multiplayer mode for up to 4 players, local or over Xbox live. It also now features an expanded track editor and a system to share those tracks with other players that will almost certainly guarantee a committed fan base and community for years. Or at least until the next Trials title is released.

It looks as if Trials Evolution is the rare sequel that actually delivers more than gamers were asking for. What do you think? Are you already throwing your Xbox controller at your TV in frustration over the game’s difficulty? Let me know in the comments below.

Chuck Mielke, director of the Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos, said, “This is our moon shot, we’ve worked toward this for a decade and a half.”

Mielke added that, concerning recent experiments, “the new magnet has allowed our users and staff to pin down the upper critical field of a new form of superconductor, discover two new magnetically ordered states in a material that has eluded scientists for nearly 30 years, observe magneto-quantum oscillations in a high temperature superconductor to unprecedented resolution, determine a topological state of a new material, and discover a new form of magnetic ordering in an advanced magnetic material.”

Check out the video below of the researcher’s breakthrough. If you’ve ever seen The Princess Bride (and of course you’ve seen The Princess Bride), you’ll notice that the 100-tesla produces a howl that sounds somewhat similar to the screeching eels of that movie. It kind of makes your dorsal hairs stand up when you think on how that primal howl was emitted from a magnetic field. Screaming magnets.

It’s hard for the laity to really conceive of how powerful a 100+ tesla magnetic field is, but to put it into perspective an MRI machine usually measures a 3-tesla. Above 10T you’d be able to cause small critters to levitate, as seen in the trippy video of a frog below:

So at 100T? We officially become mutant pinball wizards.

Sina Weibo broke records with the ringing in of the Chinese New Year this weekend which saw more than 32,312 messages sent per second according to The Next Web. The utter volume of messages saw 481,207 messages sent during the first minute of the new year.

As previously reported by us, Weibo is the only alternative to Twitter in the country and the two services that offer it, Sina and Tencent, both claim more than 200 million users each. It was Sina Weibo that shattered all previous records. Tencent Weibo was not mentioned in the report, but I’m sure they were adding their own impressive numbers as well.

The record held by Twitter is when Japanese tweeters took to the service during the climactic moment of Castle in the Sky. That event garnered over 11,000 tweets per second.

It still remains to be seen if this trend will continue as the government plans to make users register under their real names. It may make less people join the service or send less messages, but it probably won’t stop the Chinese from using social media as a form of communication.

While such descriptions will remain only superlatives, a trio of students from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands decided to turn the idea of “the biggest” on its ear and, five months and over $6,000 later, have literally built the largest video game controller in the world.

The gargantuan controller, certified by the Guinness World Records, was unveiled for the first time today at the Liverpool Street station in London as part of today’s release of Guiness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2012.

The design of the controller is based on the classic NES model and, yes, is completely function. You might have some trouble toggling those Tetris pieces with this controller, though, as it literally requires two people just to operate it. Well, I guess you could try to play a game by yourself using this controller but, I mean, if you think you can do that you might as well try sprinting to Jupiter or eating dinosaur meat because… ah, c’mon, you’re just not going to be able to do it. Admit it. This warlock is 30 TIMES the size of the original NES controller! If you were to stand it up on its end, it would stand 167 feet tall. To put the truly Brobdingnagian device into perspective, The Daily Mail shared these photos of the controller on display today:

It almost looks as if you might need more than two people to go stomping Koopa Troopas. And because you are dying to know how (un)tenable the remote is, Gamezine was on hand at the exhibition to give the controller a try and had this to say about the experience:

Within its pleasingly chunky wooden frame, the giant pad uses light-sensitive technology to detect when the buttons and D-pad have been pressed. Commuters looked on aghast as Gamezine tried its hand at evergreen classic Super Mario Bros. Despite some frantic button clobbering and careful ‘communication’ (shouting), we failed to make it past level 1 – but it was a memorable experience that brought a new dimension to a classic game, even if you need a sizable spare room to store it in.

I don’t know about you, but the image of grown ups shouting at a funny 8-bit video game in a crowded subway station while stomping away on a HUGE controller puts an incredibly sincere grin on my face.

In case you were curious about what the competition looked like for gaining entry into the famed Guinness World Records, here’s a look at a couple of guys from G4 who constructed “the world’s largest” NES controller a few years ago.

I think somebody’s got their work cut out for them. Game on, gamers.

Today, Twitter announced that we have a new tweets per second king in the realm of sports – Tim Tebow’s playoff win hit 9420 TPS last night.

To put this 9420 tweets per second in perspective, last year’s Super Bowl set the then-record for sporting events with 4,064 tweets per second. Either this is a testament to the ridiculous popularity (and hatred) of Tim Tebow or the growth of Twitter in the last year – maybe both.

Here are some other huge (non-sporting) events that Tebow beat when it comes to tweets per second: The death of Osama bin Laden (5,106); the Japanese New Year (6,939); both Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple CEO and his death (7,064 and 6,049, respectively); and the “Beyonce’s pregnant” moment at the 2011 VMAs (8,868).

Tebow has become a hot topic of discussion on the interwebs, and it’s no doubt due largely in part to his extremely vocal Christianity which he is both loved and loathed for, depending on who you ask. Sports news organizations’ “cycles of Tebow” news exacerbate the situation. Anyone who has followed the NFL this season has probably heard more about Tebow than most other players combined.

So when Tebow beats a favored team, in the playoffs, in incredibly dramatic fashion – it’s no wonder he nearly broke Twitter.

Here’s what Twitter has been saying about Tebow since Sunday evening:

Tebow is going to have to do a lot if he wants to break the overall tweets per second record. That belongs to the television screening of the Japanese film “Castle in the Sky,” which garnered a ridiculous 25,088 tweets per second.

Maybe if Tebow can best Tom Terrific, who knows?

Apple Inc. shares have been markedly higher today than they’ve ever been. The first peak occurred this morning around 10AM EST when shares increased to $427.18. The peak was short-lived as the value quickly dipped down but still hovered well above any previously observed levels. Still, this alone would have been a milestone for Apple but the good news from the NYSE pit wasn’t done dishing out the good news yet.

Roughly 45 minutes later, shares of Apple bounced back above the $427 mark and bested the previous record set earlier in the morning by peaking at $427.75. The shares dipped down again but have remained above the $423 watermark throughout the day so far. A screenshot of the rollercoaster thrill road known as Apple Makes Record Amounts Of Money is below.

One has to wonder if ChangeWave’s report from earlier today that revealed people have got the iPhone-lust in their eyes more than ever has driven the boost in Apple’s shares. Maybe it was the fact this is the five-year anniversary of the first iPhone’s debut. Maybe speculators are just excited because it’s CES week and anything related to technology and being cool makes people wanna get rich. Maybe it’s all of these factors or none of these factors (my money’s on the ChangeWave report, really). Whatever the cause, some stock market paladins will have some pretty well-lined coffers at the end of today.