If you haven’t been to San Francisco before, and you have a general interest in science outreach and STEM education, make sure you take a little time out to visit this gem on Pier 15 (directions from Moscone). The Exploratorium is a warehouse started by Frank Oppenheimer (the less famous brother), which is filled with exhibits & contraptions that teach by doing, blend science with art, etc. There’s plenty to see in all fields non-chemistry, although it comes with a price tag of $30. Visit summary/spoilers below:
Given that I’ve been involved with Physics outreach quite a bit in Sydney, there’s a number of very familiar setups exhibiting phenomena such as thin-film diffraction, electric induction, and standing waves that one would probably find at most universities. There’s some ingenious low tech demonstrations, such as visualising string vibrations by contrasting it against an illuminated rotating drum of light and dark stripes. Mid-techs include 3D-printed images from a publication on cancer-cell motility, which are animated by mounting them on a conveyor belt. High-techs like interactive simulations of bird flocking behavior.
As a side note, YouTube-popularised examples include cornstarch+water+speaker shenanigans but not 2D Ruben’s tubes presumably due to risks of fire with non-adult users.
The biological sections are supported by an in-house lab, who maintains the cultures and manages supplies (e.g. cow eye dissections for a 12pm show). All of the main model organisms are represented somewhere: GFP-transfected C. elegans, six mutant strains of D. melanogaster, live D. rerio embryos under a microscope tutorial, HeLa cells, …and one lab mouse keeping the A. thaliana company. There’s evidently a lot of background work going on to keep a fresh supply of embryoes and feed/water the living creatures, some of which is hinted at by the illustrations of Lucy Conklin along one wall. The latest foreign-culture health-hype is covered by a touchable yeast-bacterial biofilm exhibit (who make Kombucha).
Personally today, I saw the blood cells in my own eyes fluctuate with my heart beat, learned about plants that reproduce by growing copies of themselves along the edges of their leaves, and played with fuzzball algae. Of the ~95% of the items that I did examine (spending 6 hours in total), the most under-explained item IMO is a metallic-blue sphere of oil-suspended colloids(?) next to the ocean plankton population display. This darling fishbowl with its fancy fluid mechanics can explain a lot of things, – like why Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn have very distinct cloud patterns, – but it’s presented without cue. You can probably even trick the residual air bubbles on top to form regular shapes at certain velocities (though I might be imagining the hexagon). I could show you the videos on my phone, but doubtless you should try to form those jet streams yourself.
My theoretical lab-mansion will no longer have boring, giant water-fountain marbles. They will possess a replica of our solar system complete with mock weather patterns matching that of astronomical observations.
--Poker Chen