View the videos Howie Choset is a roboticist, but his team’s creations bear little resemblance to C-3PO or R2-D2. Instead, Choset finds inspiration in nature — specifically, snakes. “A lot of people have this notion that robots are modeled after people,” says Choset, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But the animal kingdom is full of organisms that use different types of locomotion, he says. The snake robots in Choset’s laboratory can slither, roll, swim and climb straight up. These slender machines, usually built from a series of metal pieces containing motors and e... (p. 32)

When a group of women in Lisbon, Portugal, entered a cooking contest in 2006, they decided to put their own spin on a Portuguese fish soup. The team created green fettuccine from gelatin flavored with coriander and garlic, meant to mimic an algae bed. Egg yolk–sized spheres, made of algae extract and filled with fish soup, nestled on top. The contestants had been asked to apply ideas from molecular gastronomy, a field exploring the science of cooking. In 2007, the Lisbon team founded a molecular gastronomy company called Cooking.Lab. The group educates chefs and the public about the field,... (p. 32)

As a senior staff scientist at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, Paul Doherty has taught kids, high school teachers and the audience of the Late Show with David Letterman about physics. But when he visited India last year, he had a different set of students: monks and nuns. Doherty is part of Science for Monks, a program run by the Sager Family Foundation in Boston and the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives in Dharamsala, India. The two groups partnered after the Dalai Lama asked them to bring science education to exiled Tibetan monastic communities. In December, Doherty taught ... (p. 32)