
Argonne National Labs Shutting Down “Ask a Scientist” - dtparr
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/
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United857
This was one of the very first Internet resources I found, as a high schooler
in 1994. A shame to see it go. Wonder what the reason was -- budget cuts?

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th0ma5
Something perhaps the Archive team could look at?

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sp332
It seems to be well-covered by the Internet Archive already.
[https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/](https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/)

Edit: I see it has been added to the ArchiveBot also.
[http://archivebot.com/](http://archivebot.com/)

Edit2: I just grabbed it myself as well, it's less than 500MB for the whole
site.
[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dtkyhb8ep8dvhaf/AABGKmFDKhIXo88mU...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dtkyhb8ep8dvhaf/AABGKmFDKhIXo88mUl-
SL9NAa?dl=0)

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toomuchtodo
I grabbed it last night and tossed it in the Archive to be kicked into the
Wayback Machine :)

[https://archive.org/details/newton.dep.anl.gov-
archive.tar](https://archive.org/details/newton.dep.anl.gov-archive.tar)

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spdustin
Well that's a shame. I live not too far away from ANL, and know an amazing
physicist and her husband (a developer) who work there. I wonder if they could
give any insight? Probably not, but I'll see.

I contracted there a long while back to work on Cold Fusion for their
environmental monitoring group. Yeah, the programming language (when it was
owned by Allaire) - it's just fun to say "I worked on cold fusion at Argonne
National Labs)

There's a beautiful nature preserve on site - Waterfall Glen, which my kids
love to explore. If anyone lives in the area, it's worth checking out. Great
running and biking paths there too.

~~~
nosage
Love Waterfall Glen!

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asmosoinio
"We will be accepting questions up to February 15, 2015 and will be turning
off this website March 1, 2015."

By turn off, do they mean shut down? If so, why would they not keep the old
content up?

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GalacticDomin8r
Sweet, now we can focus all our science attention on things like Megaldons on
Discovery Channel and creating more bad ways of doing statistical comparisons.

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bronson
Why are they shutting it down?

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imroot
Most of the labs have moved away from being owned by the public to being owned
by corporations (Los Alamos is now owned by a company called LANS -- Los
Alamos National Security -- partially owned by the University of California);
my friends who have contracted at Los Alamos have mentioned a few times over
that non-essential services have been scaled back if not completely cancelled.
I'm assuming this is also the case -- if it's not "Core" to the lab, or part
of the lab's mission, they're stepping away from it to keep their costs down.

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adestefan
The labs are known as FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Design Centers.)
They've been ran by private contracts since their inception.

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munin
Not all of the labs are FFRDCs though (also the D stands for development, not
design), some are just non-profit corporations.

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adestefan
Yes my mistake on the acronym. And you're correct there are other labs with
different structures such as UARCs or Lincoln Labs. But the point is that the
government has never "owned" the labs. They've only funded them and have let
them been run by private entities.

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th0ma5
Something perhaps the Archive team could look at?

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Elrac
I'm sad about this. Science needs to be more accessible to the public, not
less!

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colechristensen
First pass seemed like Argonne itself was shutting down.

