Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather is heating up and the longer days invite us to linger outside in the evening. But after a postprandial stroll, you might want to take a few moments to explore the sites listed below. And for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, we invite you to get cozy and check out our spring edition.

Contents

1 - SCIENCE FROM THE POLES
2 - DIG INTO SPRING AT THE SCIENCE OF GARDENING WEB SITE
3 - EXPLORATORIUM EARNS MORE WEB AWARDS

1 - SCIENCE FROM THE POLES
http://www.exploratorium.edu/poles/index.html
International Polar Year is a large scientific program focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic that will extend until March 2009. Major concerns of the IPY--climate change and building the South Pole Telescope--are included in this Exploratorium Web site, along with the Exploratorium's own polar videos.

The South Pole Telescope was pieced together by a team of two dozen scientists, engineers, and technicians in record time. In a special series of blogs and video updates direct from the South Pole, three cosmologists from the University of Chicago take us along on their race to finish the telescope before the harsh Antarctic winter.

Over the past few decades, scientists say, the earth's poles have experienced twice the rate of warming as the rest of the earth. One important focus of International Polar Year efforts will be to understand how and why the poles are affected so dramatically by global climate change. Our site contains interviews with scientists and archived Webcasts and podcasts that cover topics such as Global Warming 101 and How Global Warming Affects Penguins.

2 - DIG INTO SPRING AT THE SCIENCE OF GARDENING WEB SITE
http://www.exploratorium.edu/gardening/index.html
It's time to begin a new gardening season. This site provides interactives, videos, and articles covering many aspects of gardening, including carnivorous plants, gardening in the Antarctic, and the secret lives of flowers. Get the dirt on dirt. Find out what motivates people to grow giant pumpkins or prized orchids and enter them in competitions. Learn this and more on the Science of Gardening Web site.

3 - EXPLORATORIUM EARNS MORE WEB AWARDS
http://www.exploratorium.edu/webcasts
The Exploratorium's Web site has been in the news lately as the recipient of twoWeb awards:

The Webby Awards, the leading international honor for Web sites, awarded the Exploratorium's Total Solar Eclipse: Live from Turkey Webcast http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2006/index.html
the People's Voice Award in the new "Best Events and Live Broadcast" category of 2007 in the annual People's Voice voting.

The Exploratorium's Extremophiles in Kamchatka Web site earned the American Association of Museums (AAM) 2007 Muse Bronze Award for Online Presence http://www.exploratorium.edu/kamchatka

Revealing to a general audience the real-world processes for gathering scientific evidence, Extremophiles in Kamchatka transports us to the pristine habitat inside a collapsed volcano in Eastern Siberia, where microbial life forms thrive in the boiling-hot geothermal waters. Visually rich and accompanied by optional audio narration, the site features slideshows, as well as video collections in both English and Russian, focusing on both the uniqueness of the location and its extremophile inhabitants. These tiny yet hardy life forms, whose colonies appear as colorful patches on rock or as hairy white mats, give scientists clues about what life might be like on other planets. The site offers insight into the experience of researchers in the field--through documenting an international collaboration between microbiologists, geochemists, and geologists, and letting us observe the temporary tents that function as laboratories, and the sulfur pools that serve as both observatories and the only available opportunity for bathing.