Museum of Science & Technology, Syracuse

We visited the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology (MOST) in Syracuse last week. Usually the museum is closed on Mondays, but due to the Easter vacation, they’d opened their doors. The building is situated at the Armory in Syracuse, a traffic-heavy circle in the heart of downtown. It took some navigating to get there. Parking was nowhere to be found (and it was 75 cents per hour, for a limit of two hours). So I parked in a parking lot across from the Erie Canal Museum that we’d visited last year, and we walked to the MOST (a brisk 15 minute walk).

The museum has a very nice planetarium that we’d seen before, years ago. Because of time constraints, I opted to go for just the museum visit. After paying the admission (which was reasonable), we wandered into the main part of the building. To our amazement, we saw a huge platform with oddly-shaped structures on it. Upon closer inspection, we saw that this was the famous Toothpick City II display, ongoing before our eyes! When it’s completed, it will be the largest toothpick structure in the world with almost 4 million toothpicks used when completed! The creator, Stan Munro, was there working on a new creation.

I have already written a post, loaded with photos, about Toothpick City II and Stan’s story. It’s just amazing! And you must go to Stan’s website to see his gallery of other structures. I can’t believe it’s all in toothpicks!

After we oo’ed and ahh’ed for half an hour there, we decided to pull ourselves away and explore the rest of the museum. It’s a HUGE museum, and we were there for 3 hours! The MOST is a science museum, with science-oriented displays and tools to explore and learn more about our world. There is too much there to cover all the bases here– I’ll simply detail some of our favorites, spreading it out into two or three posts.

We enjoyed playing with some lights displays. There’s one on ultraviolet light that we liked. Reminded me so much of the 1980s!

A display showing how monochrome light works was fun.

A human brain. Ick. Wonder who donated it? Someone from the NY legislature?

Ooo and this was cool– surround yourself with a big bubble! None of the kids were very enthusiastic about trying it, but when I begged, they gave in. Making a big bubble is much harder than it looks.

We got everyone involved.

Still didn’t get a bubble higher than a foot ot two. Nuts. I did SO want a photo of one of the kids inside a big bubble.

There was a lot more to see! This was phenomenal– a huge butterfly and moth collection. It is amazing to see how beautiful these creatures are, even the creepy-looking, furry ones.

A light-up display of the tectonic plates and earthquakes zones of the world.

I found this interesting, as I had a career in radio before becoming a SAH Mom. It’s a display of a radio station. I assume this is operative? It looks like it. It’s not a terribly old radio station set up– when I was doing radio in the late 1980s, we didn’t yet have computers and CD players– it was still reel-to-reel and 8-track tapes then.

And the kids spent an unusually long time making faces in the fun mirrors.

And that’s not all! This only hit on about 1/3 of our exploration. I’ll have more photos and information to come! We loved the MOST!