Science Tunnel opens in León, Mexico

To round off its successful tour of Mexico, the "Science Tunnel" exhibition is being presented until January 8th, 2011

November 08, 2010

The Max Planck Society’s Science Tunnel science exhibition has been touring Mexico since June 2010. The exhibition about trends and boundaries in cutting-edge scientific research can be seen in León, a city with one million inhabitants. This is the last stop on the exhibition’s tour of Mexico where it has been staged as part of the country’s bicentennial celebrations.

From November 4th, citizens and visitors of the city of León are invited to "come and marvel" when the Science Tunnel is presented at the city’s Museo de Arte e Historia, which was built in 2008. On the evening of the festive opening of the exhibition, Mexican President Felipe Calderón, Lic. Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez, Governor of the Mexican state of Guanajuato, Romero Hicks, General Director of the Mexican science council CONACYT, Edmund Druckwitz, German Ambassador to Mexico, and Walter Stühmer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen openec the unique exhibition. Since 2009, the Science Tunnel has been one of the biggest events staged as part of the Bicentenario celebrations, marking 200 years of independence for a number of Latin American countries. The exhibition’s tour of Mexico was made possible through the support of the Mexican national science council, CONACYT, local partners in the state of Guanajuato and the German Federal Ministry of Science and Research (BMBF).

The Science Tunnel has already fascinated and entertained huge numbers of people on almost all continents - Europe, Africa, Asia and North America - in recent years. A new version of the exhibition has been touring South America for the past two years. Over 150,000 visitors attended the exhibition in Chile and Argentina. In Mexico City and Monterrey, over 170,000 undertook the fascinating journey through the present and future of scientific development.

The Science Tunnel takes its visitors on a tour encompassing everything from the microscopic elements of life to the largest structures in the universe. Numerous interactive exhibits, large-scale audio-visual presentations and hundreds of individual photos and images enable visitors to experience cutting-edge science at first hand. They can observe atoms and molecules at work, trace the path of human culture back to the roots and zip through the German city of Tübingen on a bicycle. How these discoveries will influence our lives in the years to come is the central focus of the exhibition.

The Science Tunnel aims to inspire the interest of young people in particular in science and research, and motivate them to study science and technology, or to pursue a science-oriented profession. The exhibition also enables visitors to become better acquainted with the Max Planck Society, one of the world’s top research institutions. School pupils and students can find out about courses in Germany and how high achievers at German research facilities are supported and promoted in graduate colleges and postdoc programmes.

The exhibition can be seen until January 8, 2011 in León. The Science Tunnel is then scheduled to travel to Columbia for the Bicentenario festivities there.

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