Mind Duel

Top high school students take-on scientists in a battle of wits.

Richard Hart will MC Wonderfest's gala Saturday evening event, including The Mind Duel

Are scientists the narrowly-focused nerds that stage and screen often depict? The fourth annual Mind Duel offers a just-for-fun general knowledge contest between a daring team of Bay Area scientists and the cocky championship WonderCup Challenge team of high school science students. This battle of scientific generations takes place on stage at Stanford's Hewlett Teaching Center as part of Wonderfest's evening presentation, 8:00-10:00 PM, on Saturday, October 27. The presentation offers not only the Mind Duel, but also the awarding of the 2007 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, as well as Wonderfest's only panel discussion: "The Promise of 21^st-Century Science"

Richard Hart is the Bay Area's foremost broadcast science journalist.  He has reported and anchored newscasts for NBC, CBS and ABC. For his 5 years on the Discovery Channel's "The Next Step," Richard was awarded a CableACE as best show host.

Richard is the only person to win both a DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award for investigative reporting and an Emmy award for comedy.  He holds a degree in physics and is on NASA's short list to become the first American journalist to report from space.

As a founding member of CNET Television, Richard hosted and produced 5 television series for that new media company. Those series aired on CNBC, USA Network, Sci Fi, and in direct syndication.  Richard left CNET to form new media production company New Material.

Today, Richard is pioneering new techniques to acquire and deliver video.  He is the first and only independent journalist providing High Definition news reports for broadcast.  In fact, he has not used tape for 2 years.  Richard delivers Next Step reports directly to broadcast servers over IP networks. He has also been instrumental in bringing Wonderfest video to the Internet.

Wonderfest is endorsed by the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California.
It is  directed by Tucker Hiatt.
It receives generous administrative support from The Branson School.
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