To commence the 5th year of Salon’s X-istence, they'll be X- ploding the essence of Salon with X-plore, X-periment, X-amine.

This may be the year of international X-perimentation in the scientific world with all eyes on CERN, but really, isn’t it just hanging round a big atomic roller disco nibbling on gruyere? Back in the 17th century when the first recordable transit of Venus was looming, the scientific community had to battle pirates, the Russian winter, and their violent enmity of each other to take up the positions from which their calculations would reveal our place in the universe.

Famed writer Andrea Wulf tells the story of this first scientific collaboration and X-peditions the race to chart Venus in Measuring the Heavens.

Caspar Henderson’s X-amination of X-tinction recreates the medieval beastiary helping us to think differently about our planet, the animals in it and our role in between. He will be highlighting creatures from ‘The Book of Barely Imagined Beings’, a beautiful catalogue of the world’s most peculiar animals, their unique talents, as the world increasingly becomes anthropocene; a place where humans are the largest single influence on the Earth’s system, the ways in which we can use our wonder to keep them safe from harm.

And finally let us lead you in to X-ploration with Simon Garfield. Yes himself off of Just My Type world fame will be leading us on an interactive journey around maps. Do they hold the key to life itself? From the quest to create the perfect globe to the challenges of mapping Africa and Antarctica to the mapping of Monopoly, it turns out making them is almost as impossible as reading them.