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Welcome to the Expo!

Welcome to this "alpha release" of our online Science Expo, Science for the Millennium, a product of the Education and Outreach Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Our prototype online Expo focuses chiefly on astronomy and astrophysics, advanced computation, and virtual environments, although later on we hope to extend coverage to other areas of science and engineering.

In creating this Expo we are seeking to:

Showcase fundamental and applied science, particularly "Grand Challenge" research underway at NCSA, its major partners and collaborators and our parent institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Apply the latest information technologies to aid communications between scientists, technologists and broader audiences in research, education, business and government.

Prototype seamless integration of dynamic media, particular digital video, into a rich web of content that will serve as a valuable multimedia resource for science education, particularly at the high school and college undergraduate levels.

We thank the numerous people at NCSA, its sister organization, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), and at a number of other academic institutions who have contributed their time and talents to the development of Science for the Millennium or who have otherwise made this project possible. Funding support from the National Science Foundation, the State of Illinois, NCSA's Corporate Partners and the University of Illinois is gratefully acknowledged.

If you've already viewed our introductory video tour or read the accompanying script, then you know that there is a whole lot of information here -- text, images, and movies -- to explore and interact with. In order to make your electronic tour as trouble-free as possible, we urge you to take a few minutes to browse the navigation tips and technical corner, especially if you're not sure how well your computer is equipped for travelling on the Web.

A word about how we represent exponents in numbers. Owing to the limitations of many present Web browsers, we have chosen not to encode exponents, at least at this stage. Instead we have elected to use the symbol ^ to indicate "ten raised to the power of." For example, 5^3 means 5 multiplied by 10 raised to the power of 3, or 5 times 1000 (which equals 5000). Likewise, 5^-3 means 5 times 10 raised to minus 3, or 5 multiplied by 1/1000, which equals 0.005.

We hope you enjoy browsing through the exhibits. On your way "out," please stop at the Information Center and take a few moments to send us your comments. We value your feedback!

Navigation Tips

Technical Corner

Production Credits

Copyright & Trademark Notice

Disclaimer Notice

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