FRIES WITH THAT?

A team from Purdue University won the 21st Rube Goldberg Machine Contest with a device that makes a hamburger in 156 steps. Drew Wischer (above), a senior and team captain, resets the contraption. (Photograph by Vince Walter, Purdue News Service)

STROKE OF GENIUS: A professor at Northland College has invented a canoe paddle for one-armed boaters.

TWO THUMBS UP: Ryerson University, in Toronto, will offer classes this fall in a multiplex cinema that has been designed as a dual-use facility.

THE EXAMINED LIFE: A fine-arts graduate student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville lived in an "inside out" house on the quad to dramatize the lack of privacy in the era of social-networking Web sites.