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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the more or less weekly podcast of

Scientific American posted on September 28, 2009.

I'm Steve Mirsky.

In this episode, we'll search New York City in the metropolitan area for elusive crickets and Katie Dids,

and we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news.

But first, something I've been holding for release for a while,

we'll hear from Scientific American Daily podcast correspondent Cynthia Graber about a very

interesting contest at MIT.

The MIT Clean Energy Prize competition. What is that? I know it's pretty new. This was only

the second year.

Yeah, it was fascinating, actually. It was even more interesting than I expected it to be.

Last year, in the first year, it was just MIT, and this year they expanded it to universities

around the country. So there were 113 student groups competing for a number of prizes from 40 universities. There were five

categories that they were competing in. One is biomass. One is something called clean hydrocarbons

and non-renewables. Then there's the renewables category. There's energy efficiency and infrastructure.

The last one is transportation. And the winners in all those five were the

finalists for the $200,000 prize. But each one of those companies and the student groups won a

...