J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), has been awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching—Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor. Kousser was selected for his "exceptional ability to draw science and engineering students to appreciate the intellectual rigors of legal thought."

Congratulations to Chris Hallacy, Brad Saund, and Janet Chen for their victory March 8 in the 26th annual ME 72 engineering design competition. This year's theme: "Extreme Recycling." The mission: Design, build, and deploy two vehicles and traverse difficult terrain (water, sand, rocks, and wood chips, with one type of terrain in each of four different 6' x 10' boxes) to collect plastic water bottles, aluminum cans, and steel cans.

Ken Pickar's class, "Product Design for the Developing World," challenges Caltech students to solve some basic problems of the world's poor. The catch: in ten weeks, they must turn rough concepts into workable designs, including financial and market assessments. On December 7, this year's students presented their results. Their visual aids included a typically Caltech-like hodgepodge of pipes, motors, and fans—but as Pickar reminded the audience, "Prototypes aren't supposed to be elegant. They're supposed to be crude and quick."

How would Jehoshua “Shuki” Bruck sum up his success as a teacher in just three words? “I love ignorance,” declares the exuberant winner of Caltech’s 2008 Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.