CHRISTMAS isn’t all booze and mince pies—there’s plenty of alternative
fare on offer at museums and exhibitions around the world.
If you’re in Australia, you could try To Mars and Beyond at the new National
Museum of Australia in Canberra. Here you can search for the origins of life,
travel to the Red Planet in a virtual reality spaceship, and hear Aboriginal
Dreamtime stories.
Skateboarders and sports fans on the US West Coast can head for San
Francisco’s amazing Exploratorium. You can learn the secret of the “ollie”, that
startling jump that boarders take over obstacles with the skateboard seemingly
glued to their feet. It’s not glue, of course, but physics, proving you can
fight gravity and win.
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Way out east, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has a major
exhibition opening on 2 February called Extreme Deep: Mission to the Abyss. New
discoveries about the submarine surface of our planet are promised, as well as a
ride in a virtual Alvin, the famous submersible.
If you’re in Paris, pay a visit to Man Transformed (L’homme
transformé) at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. It’s
the first of three exhibitions in a major new programme called The Challenges of
Living (Les défis du vivant), which looks into the
latest advances in biology and biotechnology. Through interactive displays,
including a giant cell membrane, it promises to take you on “a true journey
inside the human body”. And after the excesses of Christmas, that could be quite
a ride.
