Prof. Ned Wright of UCLA has a cosmology tutorial available. See also his piece and various others in "The Origin and Evolution of the Universe," edited by Ben Zuckerman and Matthew Malkin (Jones and Bartlett, 40 Tall Pine Drive, Sudbury, MA 01776, 800 832 0034).
At the Shoder Education Foundation WWW site, students can make use of a web-based interface to interactive simulations--including computer models of the formation of a galaxy and the behavior of cooling electrons--that run on a remote supercomputer. These are not static animations but interactive models in which students can tweak the experimental variables and watch the results appear as animated visualizations in the browser window. (You'll need a Netscape-compliant browser for this to work.) The site also allows students to download simulation software to create similar models on personal computers. Instructional resources ready for use in the classroom are provided, too. Connect at: http://www.shodor.org/.
Searches for dark matter continue. The "Macho" consortium (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) is looking in the Milky Way's halo and the OGLE ("Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment") is looking in the center of the Milky Way. The Macho group uses a telescope in Australia to study the Large Magellanic Cloud. During a two-year period, they examined 8.3 million stars and found three episodes that seem like gravitational lensing. These are fewer than expected, if Machos exist, by a factor of about 5. The OGLE group found more microlensing events than they expected in the center of our galaxy. One possibility is that we are looking along a bar and that the Milky Way is more of a barred spiral than had been expected.
A summary article on microlensing appeared in Science for 5 May 1995, pp. 642-3. It also discussed the Experience de Recherches d'Objets Sombres (EROS), which, translated, means "Experiment of Research on Dark Objects."
Searches for dark matter were described in The New York Times for April 18, 1995, pp. C1 and C10, in an article by Malcolm W. Browne.