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

These tricky pictures shift and change as you look at them.

A physicist, a scientist, and a musician experiment with sound, music, and acoustics using instruments both real and found.

Do hot water and cold water mix?

Meteor, meteorite, meteoroid – what's the difference?

Grow spikes of crystals in the sun.

You can measure your reaction time with just a yardstick and some help from a friend.

From May 20 to June 5 1997, we presented a webcast series exploring the art and science of severe storm visualization.

Peter Whitehead is an instrument builder, performer, and composer.

Learn about origami, make your own paper, and find out the best way to fold a paper airplane.

You can mix just three colors of light to make over 16 million different colors!

Your brain is always looking for blank spaces and filling them in. Sometimes, your brain leaps to the wrong conclusion. Then you get a surprise!

Bring movie, TV, and cartoon images to life.

The three most densely populated cities on the planet where seismologists expect major earthquakes are San Francisco, Tokyo, and Istanbul. Find out why the effects in each city will be very different.

Activities and History

Sometimes we can learn about outer space when space objects come to us.

Find out why people who love birthday parties should move to Mercury.

Decorate your white walls with rainbow colors!

What kinds of candy are made and enjoyed in where you live?

Meet David Goodsell, a molecular biologist and artist who finds beauty in the molecules of cells.

An introduction to the concepts and theories that contribute to contemporary complexity research.

Activities and workshops for playful invention, investigation, and collaboration

Create your own fish mummy using common baking soda!

What's the science behind a home run? Why do curveballs curve? Learn about the game from players from the S.F. Giants & Oakland A's.

It's easy to fold a sheet of paper in half. But can you fold a sheet of paper in half ten times?

Do hot water and cold water mix?

Tour a hydroponic greenhouse in frozen Antarctica.

What's at fault?

Leonardo's famous painting is used in an interesting perceptual experiment.

A drop of water makes a fine magnifying lens.

The nearly ice-free Dry Valleys are an Antarctic anomaly, and Earth's closest equivalent to Mars.

Why is your shadow longer in winter than in summer? Grab a basketball and some paperclips and find out!

Kid-friendly explorations and experiments for curious minds.

The Antarctic food web is the simplest on the planet, and krill are at its hub.

Using a spectroscope, you may see that what appears to be a single color of light is really a combination of colors called a spectrum.

In September 2004, the Exploratorium covered a conference in the Galapagos Islands, organized by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, that considered the implications of El Niño forecasting.

Ever notice how noisy people are?

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

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

If you're a patient gardener, you can grow your own hybrid flowers.

In celebration of Albert Einstein's work in 1905, science laboratories and museum around the world (including the Exploratorium) participated in a twelve-hour webcast that explored Einstein's influence on current physics research.

Explore the important engineering concepts of yield strength, ultimate strength, and elasticity as they relate to building a better bicycle.

For most of us, science arrives in our lives packaged neatly as fact. But how did it get that way?

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

Why is baseball so popular in Japan?

Watch ancient text revealed and read for the first time in a thousand years!

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