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We’ll have 7 really cool women engineers here this weekend for our Women Explorers event. It is free with paid admission. Girls age 10 – 13 are welcome to sign up for a workshop and luncheon with our guest speakers! Check out the info online.

How crazy is the weather this week? We’ve seen hail in Orange County! Lots of rain, wind and big fluffy clouds, too! You can learn about clouds, make your own thunder and even give your own version of the weather report inside of our weather exhibition, The Magic School Bus Kicks Up a Storm.

Bring your Valentine to Optricks Days at Taco Bell Discovery Science Center on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 14 and 15! The event is free with paid admission and includes eye-popping activities showcasing the science of light.

On Saturday, Valentine’s Day, the Southern California College of Optometry Eye Care Center will be offering complimentary eye screenings, including visual acuity tests, eye alignment, and screening for refractive error.

Throughout the weekend, hands-on demonstrations and exciting workshops for kids will be offered including Making Spinning Color Wheels, Smoke & Mirrors, Eyeball Optics, Making Rainbows, Fun with Moiré patterns, Fresnel Lenses, Lasers and much more. Holograms and optics art sculptures will also be on display throughout the Science Center to demonstrate the many creative uses for optics. Microscopes, telescopes, kaleidoscopes, binoculars and cameras will also be available for guest interaction.

Ms. Frizzle and Liz the Lizard are now in the building! We’ve just opened The Magic School Bus Kicks Up a Storm – a really fun, colorful exhibit all about weather!

Katrina "like the hurricane" Liao, age 7, reports the weather with her brother Garret, age 5, at Taco Bell Discovery Science Center.

Ten-year-old Ian and 9-year-old Ivy of Alta Loma liked Ralphie’s Hot Air Balloon Race, while 7-year-old Katrina (“like the hurricane,” her mom explained) and 5-year-old Garret got a kick out of seeing themselves on the screen when they reported the weather in the Walkerville Weather Center.

Cathy Center, a 1st grade teacher from Glen Yermo in Mission Viejo, was checking out the exhibition this morning with her students. Cathy visits once a year with her students on a field trip and said that she really like the new exhibition. But, she’s even more excited about the Educators’ Evening of Science on Thursday, Jan. 22. “I’m going to go remind my other teachers about the event, and we’ll make it a girls’ night,” she said. The Educators’ Evening of Science is our chance to treat educators to an adults-only event, where we close down the center and highlight the programs that we offer. We also bring in our community partners such as the local water agencies, the Orange County Transportation Authority and others who provide free and low-cost programs to area schools.

On Saturday, Dec. 20, 2008, Taco Bell Discovery Science Center was host to a party ten years in the making! We attempted and broke a Guinness World Record for the most people solving Rubik’s Cubes in one hour. Ninety-six people solved the Cube under our Cube!! It was so cool! Now we are going to be submitting paperwork, videos and photos to Guinness to make it official. 

Just in time for our anniversary party, NASA and JPL sent us the next Mars rover – the Mars Science Laboratory. This thing is huge! And it’s on display here until January 4. The best part is that a Discovery Science Center visitor might name this rover. There’s a naming contest going on now, and we’ve got the application forms here at the center!

Coming up next, we’re celebrating Noon Year’s Eve. What a way to end a great year!

We are so excited about this year’s Science of Gingerbread exhibition! For those who haven’t experienced it, the exhibition and related special events are a fun way to explain:
the science happening in the oven,
the planning and design that go into building edible houses,
and how that relates to the work that architects do on houses we live in!

For those of you who need more time to create a gingerbread structure for our competition, you’re in luck! We’ve just extended the competition deadline to Dec. 1! Take the long holiday weekend and cook up some science fun in your own kitchen! These amazing gingerbreads will be on display through January 4, but you might want to stop by sooner rather than later … we encourage trial and error in this competition and some of these structures aren’t quite “up to code!” More details are on our web site.

This is the last weekend for Spooky Science at Discovery Science Center! Through Sunday, visitors can check out the spooky 3-D maze and special bat-themed activities as part of our exhibition, Masters of the Night: The True Story of Bats. Read more about it in today’s LA Times article.

On Saturday, Nov. 1, we are hosting a FREE Pumpkin Launch at Cal State Fullerton’s Titan Stadium! This event is free and open to all! Hosted by our Future Scientists and Engineers of America program, along with California State University, Fullerton’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, the hope for Pumpkin Launch is that it will serve to inspire the next generation with smashing science! Pumpkins will start flying at 12:30 p.m.!

The Orange County Register just posted a video about MASTERS OF THE NIGHT: THE TRUE STORY OF BATS. Check it out here.

The exhibition and our Spooky Science program have opened and are in full force. We’ll be adding extra programs on weekends for our visitors to experience even more, and we’ll post those here when we do.

If you visit MASTERS OF THE NIGHT: THE TRUE STORY OF BATS, post a comment here and let us know what you think!

We are excited to be hosting our annual Spooky Science event starting tomorrow! This year, we’ll explore the myths and misconceptions surrounding bats with an exhibition titled MASTERS OF THE NIGHT: THE TRUE STORY OF BATS.

Bats at Discovery Science Center

In addition to this new exhibition, Discovery Science Center visitors can experience the popular ChromaDepth 3-D spooky maze, take part in hands-on activities and our youngest visitors can get trick-or-treat bags to take home!

On a different topic, a big thank you to our amazing team for hosting last weekend’s gala: “Celebrating Science – A Decade of Discovery.” The evening was a success! We raised more than $390,000 for our educational programs. This is outstanding! Thank you all for your hard work. Thank you also to all of the generous science supporters who celebrated with us and who have made these first ten years possible.

In advance of Saturday’s “Celebrating Science – A Decade of Discovery” gala, artist Debbie Zoller paints the planet Neptune on the path leading to the main doors of Discovery Science Center.

Our annual gala will be held Saturday night. We are so excited this year to be honoring Donald Kennedy, Parker Kennedy and First American Corporation with the Arnold O. Beckman award. The event is going to be spectacular, and our team is hard at work transforming Discovery Science Center into an elegant event venue.

We’ll be hosting a cocktail hour among the Science Center exhibits, but the main event happens in a tent that has been built in our parking lot for this occasion. We’re undergoing many cosmetic updates for this Saturday’s event, including having an artist paint the planets on the spheres on our main pathway. See the photo that we’ve posted here.

For all who will attend the event, we hope you enjoy your time at Discovery Science Center!