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10 cool science gifts (for every age and budget)

5. $80-$100

For children: Engino 80-model set with motor, $89.95

Courtesy of ENGINO TOY SYSTEMS

Put a child’s mind to work with this complex engineering set. Using a motor and more than 200 pieces of wheels, hooks and rims, kids can create anything from a windmill to a helicopter. Engino, the group behind the toy, began with research funded partially by the European Union. The company has won numerous awards in innovation, business, and of course, toys. 

With wheels, hooks, rims, and countless other parts, this gift is not for the faint-hearted and falls under the “pro” category. But Engino also sells basic 3-model inventor sets for beginners.

For adults: Armillary Explorer Sundial Necklace, $87.99

This jewelry is a cross between a sundial and an armillary sphere, an old instrument made of multiple rings that early astronomers used to follow the course of stars. Early sailors used both instruments to tell time and navigate. This necklace might not help you navigate the seven seas, but its inner ring can tell time when aligned properly.

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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.”

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