CO School Of Mines Students Beat Out Harvard In 'Brainiest' Quiz

GOLDEN, CO – Colorado School of Mines students competing in an online brain quiz ranked fourth-highest in the country, and above Harvard and Princeton, a Luminosity study showed.

Oredigger participants were among 75,000 U.S. college students who played the company's Fit Test brain games and were ranked in a survey of "America's Brainiest Colleges."

The ratings showed the "student population’s core cognitive abilities," according to Bob Schafer, Ph.D., VP of Research at Lumosity. Schafer said doing well on the online games "strongly correlated" with standardized ACT and SAT test scores.

However, playing video quiz games pales in impressiveness compared to another contest where School of Mines students also dominated this year: The Materials Bowl, a national contest of materials engineering sponsored by the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. For eight of the 12 years of the competition, School of Mines students have won first place. No other school has won more than twice.

This year at the Materials Bowl, Mines students won second place in a badass bladesmithing competition, where the team "crafted a raindrop-pattern welded Damascus chef knife featuring an integral bolster and a stabilized Douglas fir burl handle," the school said.

The team had to heat material to 1000°C, and forge-weld it together. Then they used ferric chloride to etch out the school's logo and show how two types of steel were melded together.

On the bladesmithing team were undergraduate students Stuart Shirley and Itamar Brill, metallurgical and materials engineering, and Tyler Mertens, mechanical engineering; and graduate students Ty Porter, metallurgical and materials engineering, and Matt Zappulla, mechanical engineering. Dan McNeil of Black Birch Studio in Golden was a team advisor.

Check out the bladesmithing here: