Almost two decades of scientific answers for (young) inquiring minds

September 9, 2010 12:27 PM

The internet is full of answers, and some of them might even be true. For almost 20 years, the the Newton BBS has been a source of answers to science questions that may be accessed directly via the Web as well as through telnet (no public telnet access any more, sorry). The Newton BBS "Ask A Scientist" archive has answers from 15 science fields, from astronomy to zoology, for a total of more than 20,000 questions answered. This was covered previously, and the site is aimed at teachers and students from grades K-12, so io9's Ask a Physicist questions (with answers from Dr. Dave Goldberg) might be more engaging. See also: MIT's Ask An Engineer.
posted by filthy light thief (4 comments total)

Also cool, in this vein: Science Tracer Bullets from the LoC.
posted by carsonb at 1:29 PM on September 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm quite fond of Ask A Biologist.
posted by ambulocetus at 6:04 PM on September 9, 2010

Oh, that reminded me of another one I had floating around the bookmarks folder: Ask an Astrobiologist!
posted by carsonb at 9:56 PM on September 9, 2010

Thanks for the additions, carsonb - I was sure there were more interesting sites of the sort around, but I didn't find much of interest.

Some tag-along comments on the Newton BBS: 1) I'm impressed that some sections have archives going back to November 1991, three months after the first website was online (according to this wiki page, which states CERN's site went online 6 August 1991, though the BBS might have been telnet-only for a while), and 2) the site hasn't been overhauled to be "current" with the social web stuff - no "Be the first of your friends to Like this on Facebook" or whatnot, and the Q&A pages look like they were copied from a text-only message board.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:21 AM on September 10, 2010