The MIT/Harvard and Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Astrobiology teams have formed a new regional partnership that will strengthen our education program. Activities that are underway and planned for the near future are listed below.

Teacher training workshops
The Astrobiology Institute at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, currently offers three teacher workshops per year that combine presentations by researchers on current astrobiology topics with hands on activities that can be incorporated into existing curricula. We are planning to augment these teacher workshops in microbial diversity with themes related to early Earth history.

Outside lectures for Education and Public Outreach
All Co-IÕs of the team participate in a variety of lectures for educational and public audiences (ca 150 per year). Recognizing the broad interest generated by the snowball earth hypothesis and its attractiveness as a means of teaching the basics of climate system history, Hoffman's research group provide review articles at their website.

Museum Exhibits
The Harvard Museum of Natural History has begun planning a public exhibit on early evolution. Called ÒOriginsÓ the exhibit will bring an explicitly astrobiological perspective to bear on our planetary history.

National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution
The National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution is developing a new exhibit entitled Ò4.6 Billion Years!Ó Intended to serve as the central, integrative focus for the entire museum, this exhibit will begin with the formation of the earth and life, and extend through the spread of humans around the globe and the growth of civilizations. The intent of the exhibit is to integrate geology, biology and anthropology into a single exhibit by focusing on a series of discrete milestones in the history of our planet. Members of our team are actively involved in the planning of this exhibit.

Paleo*scope
Paleo*scope will be an extension of the very successful interactive website Micro*scope that has been developed by Mitchell Sogin and his colleagues at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. We are planning a corresponding image-driven website that is based directly on their model. Our objective is to integrate information on significant biological and geochemical events during the first three billion years of earth history.