Virtual Antarctica
Dump your Thursday night "Deep Space Nine" TV-watching ritual, and check out the equally alien environs presented by Virtual Antarctica, a superb marriage of nuts-and-bolts scientific data, novice-friendly language, and dignified, intuitively navigated Web design. Stuck smack-dab on the bottom of our spinning globe, Antarctica begs very few comparisons to typical earthly ecosyetms. In fact, when you leave this online tour of the globe's most inhospitable and misunderstood continent, you'll feel like you're sharing this earth with a land as distant as Beta Antares XI.

Virtual Antarctica may be considered an experiment in "instant-publishing."The girth of the site's content was accumulated and uploaded via satellite links during a 16-day expedition on the Livonia, a sturdy, no-nonsense sea vessel expressly built for traversing the frigid polar ice caps. The ship's crew included members of Terraquest, an innovative "adventure travel"company that intends to publish many more online expeditions of exotic locales (future stops include the Galapagos Islands and Mount Kilimanjaro).

One could hardly ask for more comprehensive or well-illustrated content. In many ways, Virtual Antarctica is a glossy coffee table book come to life through the power of interactive hot links. You'll find classy illustrations, artistically rendered maps, and beautiful photography suitable for *National Geographic*. The background textures, which include screened-back images of flowing cursive script and sea-depth notation, are particularly effective. All of this art direction is complemented by a wide breadth of text. Topical areas include an extensive ship's log, and easily digested information on Antarctica ecology, science, history, and environment. And should all this heady data bog you down, you can always read the crew members' poetry:

"Twas the week before Christmas/And all through the ship/Few passengers were stirring/For most were quite sick./Some tourists were restless and pacing the bridge/With visions of penguins and ice, not from the fridge."

Aesthetics aside, the poem reflects the Terraquest levity. Passage aboard the Livonia doesn't seem to have been like a Club Med adventure, but neither does it appear to have been like a winter in Stalingrad. All in all, Virtual Antarctica lends a sense of inviting accessibility to an extremely remote locale, and should beckon adventuresome Web surfers to drop their mice, and sign up for an exotic research expedition. -JP

A+

3-D Reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian Mummy
Our intense fascination with mummies can lead to intensive research, and this page is a good example. It's a technical paper by seven medical scientists reporting on the use of computer tomography, radiology and 3-D reconstruction to study unwrapped mummies in the British Museum's huge collection. Most of the page describes various research findings, and there are excellent large GIFs illustrating a number of their descriptions. The site should be fascinating to Egyptologists, amateur detectives, and those pondering the human response to death. Not for the faint of heart -- how the ancients removed the brain of the deceased is decidedly gross. -KW

C+

Aquatic Ape Info
You've gotta love Dewi Morgan, the creator of this page and the grandson of science writer Elaine Morgan, a proponent of the theory that certain primates experienced an "aquatic stage" before evolving into humans. An alternative to theories promoting the more generally accepted "savannah"stage, this theory has its fans too, and you can read their opinions here. To be fair, Dewi addresses other evolutionary theories, and admits his inherent bias. This somewhat plain page will make you curious about our biological evolution.-KW

C+

Holography
It would be nice if this site included more background information on holography for those who aren't yet familiar with the science behind this amazing 3-D imaging process. The Holography Domain includes a cool "holographic pattern generator" that you can manipulate by changing number parameters -- excellent for math and trig-heads. The Domain also features a few links to holo news, answers to holo-related e-mail, and references to companies working with holograms and lasers. -KW

C

Kinship and Social Organization
This page from the University of Manitoba anthropology department is a good idea that falls short. Someone's uncredited research paper on social organization is laid out as an "interactive tutorial." All this really means is that you jump from one page or section to another -- as if any other action would be possible. The tone of the presentation is very clinical. Since there are no footnotes or bibliographic resources, you're limited to internal content. If you're already up on "systems of descent"or "lineage exogamy," then stop here. But if not, better find some more accessible anthropology lessons first.-KW

D+

Laser Focus World
Feeling electro-optical? Then come on down to Laser Focus World, a monthly trade publication for those in the laser and optics industries. You can search back issues, read selected portions of the current edition (news, features and departments), send mail to the editor, or fill out a form that may qualify you for a free subscription. You'll also find links to other Pennwell publications including Laser Report, and Industrial Laser Review.-KW

C+

Seeds of Life
Francoise Brenckmann has created a very handsome bilingual site extolling the virtues of seeds, how cleverly they travel and germinate, and how they provide us with life in the from of fruits, cereals, and grains. Brenckmann wanted to document "this tiny and scattered world" through photos, and also wanted to share her findings. Seeds of Life is like an excellent research paper, with various sections and terrific photos. Brenckmann is something of a poet, and liberally borrows from Henry Thoreau to present the value of seeds in a larger context. Seeds of Life is a wonderful site, and is a model for employing the Web as a learning tool.-KW

A-

Society for Amateur Scientists
Science literacy is the goal of the Society for Amateur Scientists, a support organization that wants to help people "with a passion to do science find the limits of their own genius." You can learn about the interests of its members and contact them via e-mail; join SAS or start a chapter yourself; share your research or questions in an electronic forum; and query SAS for help with technical illustrations. There's even an online swap meet, so if you need a vacuum tube kit, X-ray tubes, or an oil diffusion pump, SAS is a good first stop. An interesting caveat: SAS "does not conduct research into paranormal phenomena." -KW

B-

The Aurora Page
Those who have seen the Aurora Borealis never forget it. Geologist Michael Dolan's homage to the Northern Lights illuminates the whys of this seemingly magical phenomenon; links to forecasts and geophysical reports on sitings; and provides a host of images of various auroral happenings in the far north of Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia. There are also lots of links to other space, sun, and astronomy sites, too.-KW

B+

The Tomb of Niankhkhanum and Khanumhotep
Egyptologist Greg Reeder has created a page focusing on the 1964 discovery of the tomb of two men who were part of a Fifth Dynasty Pharaoh's entourage. Reeder provides excellent inline images of what archaeologists have reconstructed, including a floor plan of the building itself. There is no documentation of sources, however. For more information, it's best to head to Reeder's home page, which contains scores of links to Egyptian sites and resources.-KW

C+

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