Education

Every year, students taking the U of MN intro to engineering class are charged with designing a robot that does something 'useful.' Dave chatted with Prof. William Durfee, director of engineering design education, about the project and the creative & fun ideas students came up with. You can see this and past year's robots here. 

With Thanksgiving around the corner, now's a natural time for parents, grandparents and teachers to promote gratitude in kids. Dr. Giacomo Bono, assistant professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, has been studying gratitude in children. He chatted with Dave about why gratitude is important, how it affects children's development, and simple ways to encourage kids to be thankful.

The IgNobels are awarded every year at Harvard University for research that first makes people laugh, then makes them think. Mike Reeves chatted with Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, about this year's awards, the incredible prizes involved, and why the whole thing got started. Nature (magazine) calls the IgNobel awards "the highlight of the scientific calendar." Celebrating research like the effect of wearing trousers on the sex life of rats, or assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, who could argue?

The U of MN Bell Museum of Natural History just launched an online, searchable interface providing access to all of its biodiversity collections. Dr. Keith Barker, part of the project team that developed the atlas, talked with Dave about what's available online and why it's important to preserve and make available these records of the historical distribution of life. You can see the atlas here.