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Argonne National Laboratory Shuts Down Online Ask a Scientist Program
itamblyn writes In a surprising decision, Argonne National Laboratory has decided to pull the plug on its long-standing NEWTON Ask A Scientist Program. NEWTON is (soon to be was) an on online repository of science questions submitted by school children from around the world. A volunteer group of scientists contributed grade-level appropriate answers to these questions. For the past 25 years, a wide range of topics ranging have been covered, including the classic "why is the sky blue" to "is there way to break down the components of plastics completely into their original form". Over the years, over 20,000 questions have been answered. According to ANL, the website will be shut down permanently on 1 March. There is no plan to make the content available in an alternate form or to hand over stewardship to another organization. When contacted about transferring the repository to another institution or moving to a donation model, the response from ANL was simply: "Thank you again for all your support for Newton. Unfortunately, moving Newton to another organization is not a possibility at this time. Thank you again for your energy and support."
Please don't. I'm already archiving the entire site into archive.org right now, and don't want their load to increase to the point they were try to prevent the archiving operation.
I'm snapshotting it right now. It'll be in the Internet Archive tonight or tomorrow.
Being work of the federal government, the site's content is not subject to copyright and is in the public domain. Anyone who wants can legally mirror the existing content. I'm making a copy as we speak.