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Mind Duel

This year, due to an unavoidable family obligation (and celebration), Richard Hart will NOT MC Wonderfest’s gala Saturday evening event, including The Mind Duel.  However, these events will carry on.  Wonderfest director Tucker Hiatt will be the Saturday evening MC.


Are scientists the narrowly-focused nerds that stage and screen often depict? The annual Mind Duel offers a just-for-fun science 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, 8:00-10:15 PM, on Saturday, November 7. The evening offers not only the Mind Duel, but also presentation of the 2008 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, as well as Wonderfest’s only panel discussion: “Is Evolution Still Darwinian?”


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 award 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 3 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.