After almost two years and $109 million of renovations, the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City will reopen Thursday, debuting new exhibits, refurbished old favorites, and the unprecedented Jennifer A. Chalsty Center for Science Learning and Teaching.

The new exhibit Skyscrapers! allows guests to explore a model skyline revealing the careful planning of these giant buildings, while kids and adults alike can join the action in a video game battle between invading germs and the immune system in Infection Connection. Just next door, Eat and Be Eaten houses some of the latest additions to the center’s family—leaf-tailed geckos, snapping turtles, mantids and many more exotic reptiles and insects.

The Communications exhibit features “The Eye Gaze,” a motion tracking device that allows visitors to use a computer without their hands. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, the users direct their eyes at an onscreen control to play music or turn on a light. The exhibit also looks at the history of writing. Guests can engrave clay, explore calligraphy, and even take the journey of a text message through fiber optic cable and radio waves.

Visitors should prepare to spend at least four hours if they want to catch most exhibits but should still save time for an IMAX show. The museum’s Dome Theater hasn’t changed and is still the largest in the world. Opening week will feature daily showings of Hurricane on the Bayou, Roving Mars, and Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs, which features the first scientists to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

The Chalsty Center invites students and teachers from around the area to take part in hands-on labs. The popular Live From… lab will continue in the new center so that 7-12 grade students can once again watch live cardiac, neuro, or robotic surgeries while participating in on-site discussions with the surgeons and nurses as they work! As part of the museum’s refurbishment, handheld keypads were integrated into the exhibit so that students can respond to questions from the instructors and see how their answers compare to those of other students.

Also new to the center is the sophisticated Global Microscope, which shows digital images of global warming indicators, atmospheric changes, and other occurrences on earth’s surface as well as other planets in our solar system.

Best of all, the Liberty Science experience doesn’t end when you walk out the door. The Center has developed the Science Now, Science Everywhere program which allows guests to use their cell phones to download exhibit information not only while they’re in the Center but also long after they leave. To check out more information on exhibits, IMAX show times, and Learning Center activities, visit www.lsc.org and the Science & the City events calendar.

One of the most-read articles in the May 14 edition of The New Yorker is a feature by John Seabrook about the The Antikythera Mechanism. The 2000-year old Greek instrument, fragments of which were hauled up from a shipwreck in the Aegean Sea where they were discovered in 1901, has been an object of fascination and puzzlement for generations of scientists who have tried to determine the instrument’s function.

But recently, the custom development of a 3D X-ray machine has provided computer tomography images that have enabled scientists to decipher a written user’s manual beneath the corroded surface of the fragments. Those findings were published in a letter in the November 30, 2006, edition of Nature.

Referred to by some as the world’s first computer, the geared box, now believed to have been used for predicting eclipses and other cosmic events, is held up as a rare piece of evidence of Greek superiority in technological development. Seabrook describes the first X-ray images of the mechanism’s innards as “a geared embryo—the incipient bud of an industrial age that remained unborn for a millennium.”

A slideshow of the images can be found at The New Yorker, and a replica of the instrument goes on display at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan later this month as part of its new exhibit, Gods, Myths, and Mortals: Discover Ancient Greece.

You can also hear Greek physicists, Xenophon Moussas and John Seiradakis, members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, describe the amazing object in a Science & the City podcast.