Explore, Play, Discover: Websites, Activities, and More

Why do wintergreen LifeSavers spark in the dark?

Artist Bob Miller's Light Walk at the Exploratorium will change the way you look at light, shadow, and images.

Learn how to use physics to distinguish between raw eggs and hard-cooked eggs.

Make amazing architecture with candy and toothpicks

Our collaboration with Public Radio International's The World. With Public Radio International, we're taking technology news beyond the headlines.

Find out what's inside a floppy disk.

Just how much fat is in ground beef? You may be surprised.

Your guide to the Northern and Southern Lights (also in 'Observatory')

A window on regeneration

Explore cantilevers and other structures by building with skewers.

Is it just a glorified plank with roller skate wheels on it? Or is it a highly engineered device through which kids have reclaimed the urban landscape, bringing creativity and style back to the sterile asphalt spaces of sprawl?

How are creative investigations sparked? What does a state of inspiration feel like? Can inspiration be transmitted from person to person? Join us for an audio slideshow series that explores the fascinating world of how we work creatively.

Learn about common techniques for peering inside the body in order to diagnose disease and injury.

What makes Antarctica inhospitable to life also makes it ideal for astronomy.

Learn how changes in genes over generations created the modern goldfish.

The common ground between pickles, cheese, bread, wine, and many other foods.

See living stem cells and find out why they are the "stem" from which all other cells develop.

Read stories and see footage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Investigate actual images of the Martian surface taken by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

Tiny shrimplike crustaceans, krill play a critical roll in many marine food webs, even feeding huge baleen whales.

What's the difference between white meat and dark meat? Which animals have which and why?

Get a taste of how the earth's plates move.

Imaginative Designs in Digital and Analog Clothing

Do hot water and cold water mix?

Discover the secret colors hidden in black ink. With a paper towel, a black marker, and a cup of water, create a rainbow of colors while exploring capillary action and chromatography.

How do you stop and steer a bicycle? What forces keep the bicycle from falling over?

Explore the surrounding sounds that everyday objects make. Build a noise contraption from these objects, then add a PicoCricket to automate your contraption. Finally, add a light sensor and program your sound automata to "play" when triggered by light.

Learn valuable graphing skills and learn about ozone chemistry.

With just mud, paper and an egg, you can grow colonies of multi-hued microbes!

In this activity, students make bridges using an oil-based modeling clay (plasticene).

See for yourself how the tilt of the earth's axis results in what we experience as the seasons.

How can a microscopic organism lift several pounds of dough? Find out with this activity.

Specialized cells have a common origin. What sets them on separate paths?

In February 2009, the Exploratorium hosted Darwin Days, a series of presentations, debates, and discussions exploring the ways scientists continue to learn from and apply their knowledge of evolutionary biology to a broad range of pursuits.

Amino acids and corn syrup combine to create new aromas.

Can you tell the difference between human and nonhuman embryos?

What is a gear ratio? And how do gears help make the bicycle so efficient?

Turn your phone into a pocket science laboratory with tools to measure light, motion, sound, and more.

Cells behaving badly

Listen in on conversations with Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, and others in Speaking of Music Rewind.

Why do teens take risks, and what do our notions of risk tell us about the dangers of growing up?

Art/science teams explore the underlying systems that give the San Francisco Bay Area its unique character.

From 1977 until 2003, the Exploratorium published a quarterly magazine. The Exploratorium Magazine Online is a companion to selected issues of the print magazine, providing key articles and activities and including multimedia features.

Our reactions may be trained, but the devices that make music sound "sad" are real enough.

Human corpses decay alfresco, all in the name of forensic science.

Is it just a glorified plank with roller skate wheels on it? Or is it a highly engineered device through which kids have reclaimed the urban landscape, bringing creativity and style back to the sterile asphalt spaces of sprawl?

Explore the unknown world inside your brain with these fun activities.

Learn the science behind bad hair days, and learn how hair increases its length when humidity increases, making curly hair frizz and straight hair go limp.

Geometry Playground will change the way you think about geometry. This exhibition engages your hands, brain, and body in playful investigations of this most visible branch of math.

Watch Venus travel in front of the Sun.