Fred Wood says Crookston has an innovative campus with technology-rich learning. He comes to Minnesota after 26 years at the University of California-Davis, where he earned degrees in chemistry before becoming an administrator.

Roger Rusack, a longtime University of Minnesota physics professor, has been a part of the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle for two decades. He helped design, develop and tweak a critical particle detector within the massive, 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. His contribution, the electromagnetic calorimeter, measures the energies of photons.

For a 14th consecutive year, the University of Minnesota Crookston has been named one of the top regional colleges in the Midwest by U.S. News. This year’s ranks Crookston in the top three out of nearly 400 colleges in the region.

University of Minnesota physics professor Jim Kakalios was a consultant on the new Spider-Man movie. In a fun video, he talks about how he taught filmakers about the science behind wall-crawling and how he came up with the "Decay Rate Algorithm" featured in the film.

The university wants to increase its undergrad enrollment by about 1,000 students -- for a total of 33,000 students. The new students would mostly be in science, engineering, technology and math.

Officials want to complete the sale of the University Lutheran Chapel by the end of the year. The congregation is trying to raise money to buy the church. The minimum price is set at $3.2 million.

The school says it will file an appeal with the Minnesota Supreme Court over the Jimmy Williams lawsuit. An attorney for the school says the judgment "has the potential to harm the University now and in the future." The Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision saying the school must pay Williams $1 million after promising him a coaching job. Williams reportedly accepted the offer, put his house up for sale and quit his job at Oklahoma State. The U of M athletic director later refused to hire him.

Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota, studies gift-giving and says most recipients value gifts about 20 percent less than they cost the giver. Worldwide, that amounts to tens of billions of dollars down the drain every year. The problem in a nutshell is that while we can all shop efficiently for ourselves, most of us just stink at finding good gifts. Waldfogel says if Christmas were a government program, we'd classify the whole thing as a gigantic waste.