The Lab: Real Science and Real Scientists
Now in Your Own Home!
How can you make plastic out of milk?
What products in your home can clean up an oil spill?
The Lab at the Museum of Life and Science is the place to learn how to answer these questions and so many more!
This popular Museum space offers children, students, and families an opportunity to discover the real science behind a wide range of topics through hands-on activities using every-day materials. The Lab is also a place where researchers, educators, and health professionals from Triangle colleges, universities, and corporations come to share ideas from their leading-edge work with the broader community.
From Design Day Thursdays, Forensic Fridays, Super Scientists Saturdays, and Living Lab Sundays, programs offered by The Lab are all designed to help participants learn how to cultivate scientific thinking and practice scientific methods like asking questions, making predictions, conducting trials, embracing “failure,” comparing data, and working with others.
In March, due to COVID-19 closure, the Museum of Life and Science pivoted to digital content for all programming including The Lab. We now offer free, interactive, online learning weekly via Lab@Home and LittleLab@Home, the latter designed specifically for our youngest learners.
Learn about these experiments and more at Bite-Sized Science!
Discover experiments to do at home and participate in free, live streaming sessions led by Museum science educators. An online chat feature facilitates questions and ensures that learning remains interactive. Popular recent programs include our Sumer Bug Out! series led by Dr. Eleanor Spicer-Rice, and Wild Sourdough, a community science project inviting viewers to cultivate “wild” yeasts led by Dr. Rob Dunn—both research faculty at North Carolina State University.
Future Lab@Home projects will collaborate with Super Scientists on research including fermentology, household entomology, and poison dart frog cognition. Given the popularity of The Lab’s online learning content, we plan to continue livestreaming Lab@Home programming even after the Museum reopens.
Learn more about upcoming Lab@Home and Little Lab@Home activities and register for sessions on their website: https://www.lifeandscience.org/activities