MSI Chicago- only the best museum EVER!

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is now our very favorite museum EVER! We loved it so much we returned only two days later! Not only is it the most interactive museum we've been to, it holds some very significant pieces of history, namely the Pioneer Zephyr train, Apollo 8 and the U-505! (The U-505 will be explained in a separate post!)

We toured the Pioneer Zephyr, the first train to incorporate three state of the art technologies when it was built in 1934; a stainless steel, streamlined body powered by a diesel-electric engine. It debuted at the Chicago World's Fair after it's first run from Colorado, hitting a top speed of 112mph and cutting the travel time for that route nearly in half!

Journey and her shadow walking alongside the train. 

One of the cars belonged to the postal service so bags of mail fill this compartment.

Interactive displays alongside the train show how different parts of the train work.

The actual Apollo 8, the first spacecraft to take men around the moon and back in 1968, is on display here. It took 3 days just to travel from earth to the moon. During their week in space, the 3 men orbited the moon 10 times and completed 6 television broadcasts before landing in the Pacific Ocean and being retrieved by the Navy. 

An autographed print of the famous photo the astronauts took of 

Earthrise, deemed one of the top 100 photos of the century by Life Magazine. 

My little astronaut

Practicing launching rockets with different amounts of energy. 

This circus section was fun. When you step on a light it plays a tone, so 

the kids were jumping and running thru the lights to make music. Too cute!

When you stand in front of this wall, virtual butterflies will land on your shadow! We loved this!

The genetics wing was one of my favorites. They have cloned mice on display and explain in detail how they were created. They take an egg from a mouse, remove the nucleus and replace it with the nucleus from a cell of a different mouse's tail. They fertilize and "activate" it and transfer the embryo into a surrogate mouse. The process is very unsuccessful. It takes many tries, like hundreds, for just one baby to be born.

This is a live frog, under a black light. They successfully transplanted a jellyfish gene into the DNA of the frog to make its eyes glow!

The chick hatchery lets you watch babies peck their way out of their

eggs on one side while slightly older chicks run around on the other. 

And then there was the water room!