Featured expedition
Starship Systems Lab
Explore a 123-meter-class reusable transport system through scale, structure, flight phases, refilling, HLS operations, and failure modes.
Dawn · Intermediate · 5 chaptersTuring Machine
Trace computation from its historical prelude through its minimal structure, mechanical translation, a demonstrator, universal machines, and the limits of computability.
Dawn · Advanced · 4 chaptersLarge Language Models
Explore the inside of large language models through embedding space, self-attention, the residual stream, and next-token prediction as near-future 3D spaces.
Dawn · Advanced · 4 chaptersQuantum Intuition
Build quantum intuition across three chapters — the qubit sphere, entangled correlations, and tunneling wave packets — as a 3D space you can rotate, tilt, and walk around.
Dawn · Beginner · 3 chaptersChemistry
Explore the foundations of chemistry across three chapters — electron clouds, why atoms bond, and the energy hills of reactions — as a 3D space you can rotate, overlap, and climb.
Dawn · Intermediate · 4 chaptersMathematical Structures
Take apart mathematical abstraction across four chapters — decomposition, transformation, iteration, and accumulation — by moving parameters that appear at once across several panels.
Dawn · Intermediate · 3 chaptersSilicon Layer
Explore the silicon foundation of computing across three chapters — the transistor switch, logic gates, and the CPU datapath — as a 3D space where you flip voltages, wire up logic, and follow one instruction.
Dawn · Beginner · 22minCosmic Scale
Travel from Earth to the Moon, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Local Group, the cosmic web, and the observable universe, connecting 20 orders of distance and the light-travel time behind each step across ten discoveries.
Dawn · Intermediate · 20minHow the Enigma Cipher Machine Works
Trace how a key press passes through the plugboard, rotors, reflector, and lampboard to become another letter.
Dawn · Intermediate · 20minMechanical Clock: The Escapement That Ticks Time
Follow mainspring power through the gear train as the escapement and balance wheel catch, push, and release to carve equal beats into moving hands.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 25minMyriad Year Clock: One Winding, Six Faces
Explore Tanaka Hisashige’s 1851 Myriad Year Clock, where a single winding of a brass mainspring runs for about a year and drives the temporal-hour dial, the 24 solar terms, the weekday, the sexagenary cycle, the moon age, a Western clock, and a celestial globe all at once.
Dawn · Beginner · 20minHeart and Circulation: Four Chambers Moving Blood
Explore atria, ventricles, valves, pulmonary circulation, and systemic circulation with a diagrammatic 3D model.
Dawn · Intermediate · 24minHumanoid Origins: When Did a Human-Shaped Machine Become a Robot?
Add one capability at a time to the same machine skeleton — a cam that remembers a motion, actuators that put torque into joints, tilt and foot-sole senses, and the feedback that pulls a falling body back — and feel the difference between having a human shape and responding like one.
Dawn · Beginner · 22minRobot Dawn: From Clockwork Automata to Walking Humanoids
Run five machines — a clockwork automaton, a teleoperated body, an electrical showpiece, a sensing rover, and a two-legged walker — and watch who decides the next motion shift from the metal itself to an operator, and finally to the machine reading its own state.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 24minPublic-key Cryptography: Sharing a Secret Without Sending the Key
Move between Alice, Bob, and Eve to explore the key-distribution problem, one-way functions, Diffie–Hellman, public-key padlocks, certificates, and the TLS handoff to a symmetric session key.
Dawn · Intermediate · 22minDaguerreotype Camera: Fixing Light onto a Silver Plate
Explore the 1839 Giroux daguerreotype camera through focus, cap exposure, silver-plate results, and mercury safety.
Dawn · Intermediate · 24minRoman Aqueducts: Invisible Infrastructure for a City
Explore source water, subtle gradients, covered channels, stone weathering, settling tanks, distribution, baths, fountains, and sewers as one urban system.
Dawn · Beginner · 18minSolar System Gravity Lab
Experiment with speed, distance, and mass to feel why planets keep falling around the Sun.
Dawn · Beginner · 17minVolcano: From Magma Chamber to Eruption
Explore underground magma, gases, fractures, and pathways to the surface as a cutaway system.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 23minPlate Tectonics
Explore how Earth surface plates move, subduct, form ridges, and gather earthquakes and volcanoes at their boundaries.
Dawn · Beginner · 18minGreenhouse Effect: The Planet Where Heat Lingers
Follow sunlight in and infrared out of a one-layer Earth, slide albedo and greenhouse strength, and watch the balance temperature settle from a frozen -18C to a livable 15C and beyond.
Dawn · Beginner · 24minDNA Replication: Unzipping the Double Helix
Explore how enzymes unzip, prime, extend, ligate, and repair DNA at the replication fork.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 22minCRISPR: Aiming to Rewrite a Single Line
Scan Cas9 along a DNA double helix, watch a guide RNA lock onto its target by base complementarity, check for the PAM, cut the double strand, and see mismatches switch specificity off.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 20minSynapse: Where Memory Forms
Follow one signal as it enters a neuron, becomes a spike, crosses a synapse, and strengthens a pathway into memory.
Dawn · Intermediate · 20minProtein Folding: The Sequence Builds the Shape
Slide a chain of hydrophobic and polar beads from stretched to folded, watch the hydrophobic core bury itself into the low-energy native fold, and compare it against an exposed misfold.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 20minPhotosynthesis: Turning Light into Sugar
Explore how light energy becomes chemical energy inside chloroplasts.
Dawn · Beginner · 18minElectric Grid: From Power Plants to Homes
Explore power plants, substations, transmission lines, and shifting demand as one network.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 26minEV Powertrain: How Electricity Turns the Wheels
Trace energy from the underfloor battery through the inverter, motor, reduction gear, differential, and tires, running forward under acceleration and backward under regeneration, then compare where the same 100 units of onboard energy go in an EV versus a gasoline car.
Dawn · Intermediate · 22minLithium-Ion Battery: Ions Travelling Back and Forth
Watch lithium ions swim between a graphite anode and a layered-oxide cathode in a transparent cell cutaway while electrons, blocked by the separator, take the long way around the external circuit. Reverse the flow between discharge and charge, and see the share lost to heat grow as you raise the rate.
Dawn · Beginner · 20minJacquard Loom: The Holes Decide the Pattern
In 1804 a chain of punched cards began driving a loom. Follow one beat at a time as needles read the holes, only the matching warp threads rise, and the shuttle carries a weft across — swap the cards and the same machine weaves a different cloth, the first physical programmable machine.
Dawn · Beginner · 18minPacket Journey: How a Message Travels the Internet
Explore how one message becomes packets and travels through DNS, NAT, firewalls, TCP/UDP/QUIC, HTTPS, CDN, and HTTP responses.
Unlocks with Stella · Advanced · 24minTokamak: The Magnetic Sun
Explore how a tokamak holds a small sun of plasma inside a donut-shaped magnetic cage.
Unlocks with Stella · Intermediate · 22minJet Engine: Suck, Squeeze, Burn, Blow
Follow air through a turbojet cross-section — intake, compressor, combustor, turbine, nozzle — as pressure ratio and throttle set the cycle temperatures, exit velocity, thrust, and efficiency.
Dawn · Intermediate · 22minAstrolabe: A Tool for Measuring the Sky
Explore the classical observing instrument that translates star positions, time, and latitude.
Dawn · Beginner · 18minWright Flyer: The Day We First Rode the Wind
Explore the 1903 Wright Flyer — raise the Kitty Hawk headwind, grow lift until it beats weight, work the canard, wing-warping, and rudder across three axes, spin the counter-rotating propellers, and replay the four flights of December 17, 1903.
Dawn · Beginner · 18minHayabusa: A Round Trip of Six Billion Kilometers
Fly the asteroid probe Hayabusa — build up delta-v with coin-weight ion thrust, drop a ball in Itokawa's hundred-thousandth gravity, touch down at centimeters per second, rewire two broken ion engines into one, and bring the capsule home on June 13, 2010.
Dawn · Advanced · 28minStarship Systems Lab
Explore a 123-meter-class reusable transport system through scale, structure, flight phases, refilling, HLS operations, and failure modes.
Unlocks with Stella · Beginner · 18minSteam Engine: When Heat Becomes Motion
Explore how fire turns water into steam, steam becomes pressure, and pressure moves pistons, rods, and iron wheels.
Unlocks with Stella · Advanced · 25minBlack Hole Observation Lab
Read a black hole as a shadow shaped by bent light, using the accretion disk, photon ring, and gravitational lensing as the first clues.