A classic Big Ten campus in the heart of a major metropolis, the Twin Cities campus straddles the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and sits atop rolling, flower-studded hills in St. Paul. Located in western Minnesota, the Morris campus is one of seven public institutions ranked by the Carnegie Foundation as a national liberal arts college. It lies in the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota. Rescue Missions Sending soldiers into minefields, houses where hostages are held, or other dangerous territory could get safer, thanks to tiny robots engineered by University of Minnesota computer scientists. Called scouts, the robots can leap over barriers 10 inches high to survey their surroundings and relay information to human operators behind the line of fire.
Scouts are battery-operated, cylindrical machines weighing only a few ounces.
They can also be launched through window glass in a protective container that breaks apart after impact. At this point they can manage about 10 leaps and one hour of operation on a single battery charge, and their creators are working to increase their capacity without significantly increasing size or weight. To view the scouts in action, click here . Key to the process is a platinum-tim catalyst, which allows hydrogen and oxygen to be heated to 950 degrees C without exploding. Instead, the heat is used to add hydrogen to ethane, producing ethylene.