So one of the researchers turned to the science question-and-answer website MadSci.org in search of advice. Ten thousand miles away, from her home computer in Boston, Mass., Kieran Kelly, a 1990 graduate of Cornell’s chemical engineering program and a one-time process engineer for ice cream and soda manufacturers, read the question and replied with a three-paragraph answer. As MadSci.org’s resident beverage expert, she knew the issue was pressure. When a bottle was opened, the pressure on the beer inside was rapidly reduced but the temperature stayed the same, which caused the beer to change states quickly.

Kelly sent off a phase-change diagram, attached a humorous bit of trivia about the concept of hot beer in an Ursula LeGuin novel, and laid out a course of action.

It was pretty simple,” she said. “I told them to let the beer sit inside for half an hour.” And the researchers were happy.

In the seven years she’s been an expert in the areas of chemistry and engineering for the MadSci website, Kelly, now a manager with The Nova Group consulting firm in Boston, has fielded hundreds of common and bizarre questions, from people all around the world. She has explained how Kool-Aid drink mix is made, why ice sticks to the top of a car in winter, why milk washes down peanut butter better than water, and what a major-league baseball is made from. She has advised children against trying to fire their ceramics in a microwave; she has provided help in mummifying a Cornish hen and has explained the mechanics behind an Etch-A-Sketch toy. As one of Madsci.org’s thirty-five moderators, Kelly also shares the considerable responsibility of screening the thousands of questions submitted each month. She weeds out obvious homework assignments and requests for medical diagnoses, pairs questions with the experts most likely to know the answer, and reviews each outgoing answer, ranking its helpfulness on a scale of one to five, and checking to make sure all attached web links are functional. Like all MadSci experts and moderators, she does all this for free. “I really just think it’s a blast,” she says. “Each question is kind of like a little challenge.” And beyond being fun, Kelly says, volunteering for MadSci.org is wonderfully convenient.

“You can access the site at any time of the day, from anywhere there’s an Internet connection,” she says. “It’s great.”

MadSci.org was created in 1995 by a Cornell classmate and friend of Kelly’s—Lynn Bry, currently an associate medical director at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and instructor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. In the late eighties, Kelly and Bry were Risley Hall dorm-mates and members of the Cornell women’s crew team. A few years after graduation, when Bry was in the M.D./Ph.D program at Washington University in St. Louis and Kelly was working for Kraft Foods in Chicago, Bry called Kelly up to tell her about a new site she was planning to launch. Would Kelly take a peek to see if it looked all right and would she like to help answer questions related to chemistry? Kelly answered, Bry recalls, “Oh, I totally want to do this.”

The idea for the site, Bry says, came after she and a number of other M.D./Ph.D graduate students gave a science-related presentation to a local St. Louis public school as part of the university’s outreach program. “We showed them something about the brain, something about the heart, something about chemistry, and then we were gone,” she says. “But the kids had questions; they wanted to follow up. And it seemed if we had some kind of question-and-answer service, we could provide a bit more information than we could in just one session.”

Bry was already the webmaster for her department, so she and a few colleagues decided to set up a forum on the Internet. Initially, there were three categories—biological science, chemistry, and “other”—and the experts were twenty-five people associated with the medical school. Soon after, other Washington University graduate students studying astronomy and physics were recruited. Then graduate students and professors from other universities began to notice the site and asked if they could answer questions. “It was literally this word-of-mouth thing,” Kelly says. “It was people searching the web, finding the site, thinking it was cool and wanting to help out.” Within six months, the site had become, what Bry calls “a global entity.”

Today Madsci.org boasts 26 subject categories, from Agricultural Sciences to Zoology, and more than 1,000 volunteer experts worldwide, hailing from academia, industry, and U. S. government agencies including NASA and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The focus of the site is still its “Ask An Expert” service, which handles anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 questions a month, but it also provides a wealth of other resources, including a database of edible and inedible experiments, a feature called the Random Knowledge Generator (which posts questions and answers from the tens of thousands of exchanges stored in the MadSci archives), MadSci FAQ (the most popular question is: Why is the sky blue?; perhaps the strangest is: could a frog survive being swallowed and vomited by a cat?), and the MadSci Library, a collection of links to science sites and information about careers in science.

Over the past eight years, the site has been recognized by a wide variety of organizations, including the U.S. Department of Education, Science magazine, New Scientist, and the BBC. It has also received awards from The San Francisco Exploratorium (Ten Cool Sites in general science) and Popular Science (winner of Best of the Web for three years in a row) and, in 2000, was nominated for a prestigious Webby Award in Science, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Bry sites four reasons for the success of the site: it’s free, fast (questions are usually answered within two weeks), factual (answers are well-researched), and friendly (responses are personalized). Two-thirds of the questions submitted to MadSci.org come from K–12 students, but Bry says the site is intended as a resource for anyone with a question about science. Some of the questions adults submit relate to scientific topics in the news (SARS, bird flu, bioterrorism, and the Mars probe are a few recent examples); some are seemingly more random.

Sherri Kohr, a K–8 science specialist in northern Virginia, recently used the site to ask whether crayfish eggs are fertilized inside or outside the body of the female crayfish. One of the crayfish a student of hers had taken home had laid eggs and the student wanted to know if they might possibly hatch. “We were all thrilled to get such a detailed answer so quickly and with so much additional information, even more than we had asked for.”

Rebecca Kilde, a freelance writer in Glenwood City, Wis., first contacted MadSci.org on behalf of her daughter to find out how and where hollow-boned birds make their blood and found the answer listed in the archive. Soon after, Kilde turned to the site again to settle an argument. She thought a sloth could turn its head 270 degrees in either direction; her husband thought 135 degrees in each direction. “I lost,” she says, laughing.

The popularity of the site with the people who sign on to be experts, Bry guesses, stems largely from a desire in many scientists to be part of an outreach-oriented community. “With Madsci.org, people feel like they’ve found their niche on the Internet. Plus they get to say ‘I’m a Mad Scientist.’”

For Jeff Yap ’98 MSE, a volunteer in the areas of physics and engineering for the past three years, there are more tangible benefits. Yap, who is studying to be a physics teacher at the University of Buffalo, and who, oddly enough, found out about the site while doing volunteer research for the science program “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” says the experience of being an expert has given him invaluable practice in communicating effectively to young people. “The trick is to explain things with enough information but not too much information. You want to put your answer down in language kids can understand.”

Don Schaffner ’83, a food sciences professor at Rutgers University, agrees. His experience as a MadSci expert closely parallels his experience as an extension specialist, a job that demands a great deal of interaction with the public. “The really important part of being able to do any type of science is being able to explain your ideas clearly to people so it really doesn’t matter if you’re talking to a child, or a person without a science background, or another scientist. Einstein said you don’t really understand anything completely until you can explain it to your grandmother.”

The kinds of research experts do in order to thoroughly answer questions varies. Schaffner and Yap both say they occasionally turn to books for answers but usually their first stop is the Internet. “More and more the answers do seem to be on the web, either on a faculty member’s website at a university or some other resource, like a government site,” Schaffner says. Joe Regenstein, a Cornell professor of food science, says more often than not he can find the answers by simply calling one of his fellow Cornellians directly. “That’s what’s wonderful about Cornell. It is amazing the wealth and depth and breadth of information that folks have around here. Often it’s just a matter of figuring out within one or two or three hops who on campus kind of knows enough about the topic.”

Kelly raves about the Internet as an educational resource, but she feels it’s important that the site do more than spoon-feed school children information. “We want to make sure that kids mine information for themselves, and not just expect that the answer will be on the Internet for them. We’ll point them in the right direction, tell them to do a web search, or look in an encyclopedia, or go to their local library.” Bry also sees a need for more education on methods to critically assess information gleaned from the web. “I don’t think that’s taught in K–12, and even at the undergrad level,” she says, speculating that most users learn on their own how to tell what’s genuine and what’s not. She adds, “We try to do our part by having our scientists say, ‘Here’s where I looked to find this information, so you know it’s valid.’”

Since its inception, the website has been running on what Bry calls “shoestrings and air.” The revenue brought in by the sales of MadSci T-shirts and paid to the site for housing links to science textbook vendors pays for the domain name and a few other small administrative items. But the lion’s share of the operating expenses—the server and the Internet connection—has been covered with money from a $30,000 federal grant given to the site in 1997 as part of an effort to make Internet resources available to schoolteachers. It’s money, Bry knows, that won’t last forever.

So as the site continues to service more and more people (the volume of questions has jumped at least ten percent every year), Bry says she’s looking for a more stable base of funding, so she can continue to develop and expand the site’s capabilities. She hopes to set up mirror sites in other regions of the country and abroad so MadSci can have a broader access to other people and also hopes to expand the website’s capabilities in handling questions in foreign languages. “We’ve had some limited capabilities to handle requests in French, Spanish, and Chinese, but it’s pretty much MadSci, the English version,” she says. “Which means we’re only reaching a small proportion of the population that’s out there.”

With the broad base of experts now volunteering, MadSci does a pretty good job of responding to all varieties of questions, though, Bry and Kelly say, the site is always looking for more volunteers.

“The more the merrier,” Kelly says. “We’d be eager to have any Cornellians sign up,” Bry adds. “More brains for the collective cranium.”

Mark Rader is a freelance writer in Ithaca and a recent graduate of Cornell’s masters program in creative writing.