'People scared of spiders will often report them being bigger than they were or say they saw one crawl into someone’s mouth, which spiders never do. If you are a teacher searching for educational material, please visit PBS LearningMedia for a wide range of free digital resources spanning preschool through 12th grade. Tabtight professional, free when you need it, VPN service.

Shapovalov is so new and so young that this is really all that anyone knows about him at this point. He finished his grass court season this year with a first-round. As a result, most of the game’s secrets lie out in the open. While speedrunners have spent years combing through games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of. The ongoing subway crisis in New York City this summer has evolved into a potent cocktail mixing commuters’ worst fears together in a hot, claustrophobic.

The shape of fear.. Humans are hardwired to fear their angular legs and unpredictability. By. Tamara Cohen for the Daily Mail. Published. 0. 0: 1.

BST, 1. 3 June 2. BST, 1. 3 June 2. When we see their spindly legs scuttling across the floor, many of us quake with fear. Although very few spiders in the UK are poisonous, it is estimated that there are a million arachnophobics in this country.

Now scientists believe they may have worked out why we fear spiders more than other creepy- crawlies. Caught in a web of fear: According to scientists, we are scared of spiders because of the way they look and how they move.

There are very few poisonous spiders in the UK - unlike other countries such as Australia, which has numerous deadly spiders including the Redback. Psychology professor Jon May said their angular shaped legs, dark colours and the fact they move unpredictably are all things we are hard- wired to fear. He said studies have shown that people tend to dislike angular shapes and prefer curved ones, have bad associations with dark colours, and prefer creatures we feel we can ‘understand’. Professor May, from Plymouth University, added: ‘Spiders just tick all these boxes, and like any phobia, when it builds up in someone’s mind they can become scared even seeing a picture.

We like bright- coloured butterflies and ladybirds, but spiders are dark coloured with long angular legs – and the shape and colour both have strong negative associations.‘We are also very sensitive to seeing things moving out of the corner of our eye and immediately notice it, and insects move quickly and unpredictably. Watch Gigantic Hd here. Many people are also scared of moths for the same reason people are frightened of spiders. Cockroaches also spark fear in many of us because of their quick, unpredictable movements and dark colour'People scared of spiders will often report them being bigger than they were or say they saw one crawl into someone’s mouth, which spiders never do. We don’t understand their behaviour.’Professor May said fear is also ‘socially conditioned’, which means we are more likely to develop it as children if we encounter it at home from our parents or siblings. He added that arachnophobics can deal with their fears by trying to sympathise with the insects and learn about them.

He and Dr Adam Hart, a reader in science communication at the University of Gloucestershire, are holding a public session at Cheltenham Science Festival on Sunday looking at the reasons people fear insects. Other people have phobias about insects such as moths, beetles and cockroaches. Dr Hart said small children are happy to handle creepy- crawlies in the garden and find them fascinating, but become scared of them as they get older. He said the rise of 'nature deficit disorder' - or children spending more and more time indoors and becoming detached from the natural world - may be increasing our fear of insects. But he said we must find ways to make people like insects more - as we have much to learn from them. He said: 'There are some insects everyone likes - honeybees, butterflies, ladybirds, but others have a bad reputation, and we wanted to get to the bottom of it.'Insects are very important to our environment and we can learn a lot from the way they live, for example how ants work together in colonies and solve incredibly complex problems.'If children are picking up their parents fear of insects, then it will take at least a generation to change attitudes, so we need to work on people of all ages.'He said one of the ways to learn to appreciate them is to eat them - and he will be cooking a mealworm stir fry for visitors to the festival.

Players Hone In On The Perfect Playthrough Of Marble Madness. What started as something of a gamified tribute to M.

C. Escher has been reduced, in recent years, to dazzling, minutes long dance thanks to modern speedrunning. Marble Madness was in many ways a forerunner to the art, and this summer the players who know the game best are closing in on its limits. I always remember that I was terrible at it,” said Steve “Elipsis” Barrios, one of the game’s foremost speedrunners. I think in reality the game is just really hard, because one of the most common comments I get is ‘Oh, I had this game but I never realized there were only 6 levels’ and stuff like that.” When he decided to start speedrunning the game back in 2.

Andrew G, a runner who first made a name for himself with Super Mario Bros. Shigeru Miyamoto.“It had been the record for six years and it seemed untouchable,” said Elipsis. I went from casual races to noticing that my sum of best was better than WR and then thinking, wow, if I can string together a good deathless run I could actually take this record.” Soon enough he had secured a record two seconds ahead of Andrew G’s “untouchable” one. He kept pushing himself and eventually got it down to 2: 4. Anyone who’s played Marble Madness knows how hard it is, but unless you spent a lot of time trying to navigate its frustrating physics puzzles, you might not know just how short the game actually is.

The game only has six levels and because Marble Madness is a race against time, an experienced player can complete the game several times inside of an hour. For this reason the game isn’t just a natural fit for speedrunning, it’s the only way to play it.

It seems like the perfect forgiving yet optimized speedrun,” said AD2 in an email, another of the Marble Madness series’ veteran runners who specializes in the Genesis version. Deaths might be frequent but restart times are minimal, making it approachable for newcomers. Decades before Super Meat Boy, Olli.

Olli, or Trials, Marble Madness had already made tight gameplay loops a cardinal virtue. In addition, the game has a clock and treats time like a scarce commodity with players having a limited number of seconds in which to complete each level and eventually the game, making every playthrough a speedrun by default. The shortness of the game allows it to have a range of interesting and precise tricks in it because after a reset you are always less than three minutes from the end,” said AD2. Mark Cerny, the developer behind the original arcade version, explained that the race against time idea for Marble Madness was borrowed directly from another arcade game, Pole Position.

In his 2. 01. 3 GDC talk about creating the game, Cerny discussed how the limits of hardware at the time, and specifically the difficulty of working with raster graphics forced the team to strip away anything that wasn’t necessary and stay focused on a single concept: steering a colorful blob across a series of warped mazes. The shapes are simple but the geometry is precise, simulating the weight and feel of a marble as well as early 8. As a result, most of the game’s secrets lie out in the open. While speedrunners have spent years combing through games like Super Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in search of any little wrinkle in the game’s code that might give them a slight edge in completing it faster, Marble Madness is tightly wound and relies on the same handful of pixel- perfect stunts every playthrough. One example is on the game’s fifth level, Silly Race.

In the Genesis version there are a row of birds which fly across one section of the level to obstruct the player’s path, but it’s possible to actually get out in front of them and shave precious seconds off a final run time. On the NES version, a trick immediately after the bird section on Silly was what allowed Elipsis, another pillar of the series’ speedrunning community, to break his previous world record by little more than half a second with a time of 2: 4. Getting your marble to a specific point on the screen—the third gridline to be precise—makes it possible to clip through a wall and save fractions of a second. It’s something Elipsis spent months practicing in preperation for performing the game at this year’s Summer Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon.“What made me feel like I could get the 2: 4. I was getting to Silly Race from my SGDQ practice,” Elipsis said in an email.

So I needed a run that was near flawless and then to pull off this stupid hard trick at the end. But I was going for every little time save on the way there.

Fast Frame- rule 5. Intermediate race section, early hammers in Aerial.”What Elipsis refers to as “early hammers,” for instance, is a part of the game where the player, if they’re extremely practiced, can actually move faster than the view on the TV screen, allowing them to bypass traps intended to slow them down. Shaving a single heart beat off the game’s world record meant nailing every trick he’d previously learned in addition zero- room- for- error one on Silly.

And by that same logic, Elipsis has more time in his back pocket that could be shaved off in the future if he was ever feeling up to it. So if you take out the small mistake on the Ultimate Race I would have had maybe 2: 4. So then we’re talking about that run happening again, but with even more frame rules saved on the way to Silly, and then literally every corner done flawlessly and then the pixel perfect bounce and then the perfect Ultimate and that’s your 2: 4. Then I retire forever.”Despite the passion and dedication of a handful of runners like Elipsis and AD2, the game’s speedrunning community remains surprisingly niche relative to the game’s cultural significance (how Nintendo left it off the roster for the NES Classic is beyond me). But given the success and popularity of Elipsis’ run at SGDQ 2. Best of NES competition this September. There’s something of a Xeno’s Paradox for speedrunning where the more sophisticated playthroughs of a particular game become, the harder it is to keep progressing.

It took years to close in on 2: 4. In the race for flawless speedruns, however, Marble Madness stands out as a clear contender.

I think Marble Madness is unique in that it’s one of the few speedruns that I believe has the potential to be absolutely perfect,” said one of the game’s earliest star players, Andrew G. While he’s not sure we’ll ever actually get to see that happen, he admits it feels like there’s a real chance it could happen.