Argonne National Labs Shutting Down “Ask a Scientist” | Hacker News Reader

Argonne National Labs Shutting Down “Ask a Scientist”

newton.dep.anl.gov

41 pointsdtparr20 comments

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?

Something perhaps the Archive team could look at?

It seems to be well-covered by the Internet Archive already. 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/

Edit2: I just grabbed it myself as well, it's less than 500MB for the whole site. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dtkyhb8ep8dvhaf/AABGKmFDKhIXo88mU...

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

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.

Love Waterfall Glen!

"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?

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.

Why are they shutting it down?

No idea, but they recently shut down their public software mirrors, too:

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/

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.

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

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

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.

This is not correct...the DOE labs are government-owned, contractor operated (GOCOs). Except the one in Pittsburgh, which is owned and operated by the government.

It has nothing to do with ownership. Gov labs all over, regardless of ownership, have cut back to core operations due to the political climate of sequestration.

probably, the growing swarms of administrators have soaked up all the budget

Something perhaps the Archive team could look at?

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

First pass seemed like Argonne itself was shutting down.

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