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10 cool science gifts (for every age and budget)

2. $20-$40

For kids: Snap Circuits Jr., $20.55

Amazon.com

Promising young electrical engineers can create a flying saucer, an alarm circuit, a doorbell, and much more with this award-winning kit from Elenco Electronics, a company that began in 1972 with two electronic engineers. Children can fit these circuits together on a base grid using snap wires that carry electricity. The kit includes a motor and a speaker that creates sound from electricity. The manual shows how to create all 101 projects, each with a specific learning objective. Kids can learn how a fan increases its speed with the flip of a switch or experience the science behind touch-lamps.    

Completely new to electric circuits? Don’t worry—the manual also has clear instructions of “do’s and don’ts.” 

Ages 8+

For adults: All About Science Geek Math Clock, $27.95

Zazzle.com

It might take a while to understand this clock, but for your STEM friend in college—the one who was always doing work in the lab—it takes no time at all.

It’s 1 o’clock? Well, 1 g/cm³ is the number of the maximum density of water, which occurs at 4 degrees Celsius. (Actually, it’s a tiny bit less than 1­ – 999.9720, to be exact). Now it’s four? That happens to be the same number of base pairs that make up DNA! Time suddenly got a lot more fascinating to your science whiz of a friend.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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