Theater 360 opened to the general public on Thursday, December 21, 2006.
Theater 360 is a movie theater in spherical 3D, a movie experience in which the viewer is surrounded on all sides by a seamless sphere of video and sound. Theater 360 was born at Japan Pavilion Nagakute, at Expo 2005 Aichi, Japan, as the "Earth Room." The feature was subsequently transferred to the National Museum of Nature and Science, where it acquired its present name. With a dome measuring 12.8m in diameter (chosen symbolically as approximately one millionth of the diameter of the Earth), the interior of Theater 360 consists of a seamless sphere of movie screens, on all sides in three dimensions. Visitors stand on a bridge in the center of the attraction to view movies. With the movie visible in all directions 360 degrees around, the theater creates an unforgettable three-dimensional realism that is truly the first of its kind in the world.
The Museum has created two original films specially for Theater 360, which run in combination with the films from Expo 2005.
The thrill of being surrounded in sound and video has to be experienced to be believed.

“Blue Brilliance”  “Green Murmur”  “Luster of Life”
A set of these three movies is shown only once around 7pm at every Friday.

The universe: a journey of 1.37 billion years - everything comes from the stars-  

The universe began with the big bang 1.37 billion years ago. Immediately after its birth, the universe was unimaginably hot and dense. From this point on, it continued to expand, and the first star was born from a cloud of hydrogen gas. And within the framework of a large-scale structure formed in the shape of a net, innumerable stars and galaxies were born. One of these was the galaxy called the Milky Way. It was within the Milky Way that our sun was created, and planet Earth was formed. The matter that makes up human bodies was also originally part of the stars.

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The big bang is the beginning of all the matter currently contained in the universe. Time and space also begin from this point. In the first 3 minutes after the big bang, all the elementary particles that form the basis of matter came into existence, and hydrogen, helium and other atomic nuclei were formed from protons and neutrons. 380,000 years later, electrons were captured by atomic nuclei, and at one bound, the field of visibility within the universe were opened up. A clear day in the universe had dawned.	The first stars were many hundreds of times heavier than our sun. Within the stars, hydrogen was transformed into helium by a process of nuclear fusion, and then, as a further process, heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron were formed from helium. When the center of the stars was filled with iron, great explosions were caused. This was the time of supernova explosions. At that point in time, elements like gold and silver, that are even heavier than iron, can be formed. Elements like these were scattered throughout the universe, and formed the building blocks for the next generation of stars.	Within the molecular cloud, formed by an accumulation of gas and dust, about a million years passed, and clusters of hydrogen gas formed the “germ of the sun”. This “germ of the sun” attracted more gas and dust, and became a sphere; at its core, a “baby sun”, termed a primeval star, was born. With this “baby sun” at its core, the solar system was formed, and our earth was born.

The ocean food chain - the flow of energy from the sun to the bluefin tuna fish-  

The beginning of life on earth happened about 4 billion years ago. Today, more than 1.75 million different species of bio-organisms exist on earth. The majority of these species live within the framework of a “food chain” network, converting light energy from the sun into food as the source of life; this life is then passed on to the next organism in the chain through the repeated process of eating and being eaten,. In this presentation, we will look at how, in the oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, light energy is turned into food in the course of this process.

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In the shallow coastal waters of the world’s oceans, many different kinds of algae receive energy from the sun and carry out a process of photosynthesis, growing by means of forming organic matter. On the other hand, even in the open sea, where it seems as if no life exists, a wide variety of microscopic phytoplankton, measuring from several µm to 1mm in size and assuming strange shapes, drifts through the ocean and proliferates by means of separation in the course of photosynthesis that draws on the light energy of the sun.	These microscopic phytoplankton will be collected and eaten by the larger zooplankton such as copepoda and krill. Thus, we can say that the amount of solar energy stored in zooplankton is a size larger than that in the phytoplankton. And the zooplankton in turn are ingested with every gulp of sea water by a sardine or a saury, pass through a fine branchial sieve located at the base of the gills, and are thus eaten.	The Japanese common squid is very fond of sardines and the Pacific saury. It can move as it pleases, and with its 10 tentacles can capture and hold sardines and saury, and bite and tear their flesh to pieces with its hard beak so as to eat them. But now the king of fish, the bluefin tuna, is approaching, and has its eye on the squid. The squid squirts out ink and tries to flee, but it is caught by the tuna, which disposes of it with one swallow.

World of the Dinosaurs: Tale of the Fossils

Dinosaur fossils consist almost exclusively of bones and teeth. It is impossible to reproduce the world of living dinosaurs, as in the movies, with scientific accuracy. Nonetheless, we can imagine how the dinosaurs may have moved and lived from the shape of their bones, teeth and joints. Let's try to imagine the world of the Triceratops, featured in the Museum's dinosaur exhibit room, which thrived in North America during the Cretaceous era.

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The Triceratops skeleton on view at the National Museum of Nature and Science is the most complete Triceratops specimen in the world. It is displayed in the stretched-out pose in which it was found in the earth. It was research from this specimen that enabled scientists to begin to clarify the shape of the Triceratops' front legs and its mode of locomotion. Let's visit the US state of North Dakota, where this specimen was found, as it was 65 million years ago: Today the region is a dusty prairie, but in the late Cretaceous it was a lush, forested plain.

Though some have posited that the Tyrannosaurus was capable only of scavenging the flesh of dead animals, evidence has recently been found of Tyrannosaurus attacks on Triceratops. Though the dinosaurs are extinct, some of their heirs survive today in the form of birds. Birds aside, some 1,000 species of dinosaur have been accorded scientific names, but these represent but a fraction of the true diversity of the dinosaurs. The great majority of dinosaur fossils remain buried in the earth, waiting for us to find them.

The Changing Earth and its Mantle: Earth's Amazing Interior

The continents move around, break up and merge with the movement of tectonic plates, as the sea floor is generated at mid-ocean ridges and sinks into the Earth at ocean trenches. These currents generate earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and sometimes form tall mountain ranges. The key to understanding these changes is the circulation of the Earth's mantle over hundreds of millions of years. This motion, unseen deep inside the Earth, is a convection process in which hot rock rises from the lower mantle while cooler rock sinks from close to the surface.

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The Earth's interior consists of a crust and mantle made of rock and a core made of iron. Using tomography based on seismic waves, scientists have learned that the Pacific plate is sinking via the Japan Trench and stretching out under the Eurasian continent, and that hot plumes exist under the South Pacific Ocean and Africa.	As the relatively cool and dense plates sink into the ocean trenches, they fall toward the mantle. In turn, hot plumes rise from the lower mantle in separate locations. As these hot plumes approach the surface, they break up into smaller plumes, forming volcanic eruptions.	The Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa is a vast tear in the surface of the Earth, dotted with numerous active volcanoes and lakes. This rip in the fabric of the continent is thought to be related to an enormous hot plume deep in the mantle. As this plume continues to grow, the ocean will eventually rush in, creating a sea like the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.