Kalpana Chawla was an Indian-born American astronaut and aerospace engineer who was the first woman of Indian origin to fly to space. She first flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator aboard STS-87. Chawla's second flight was in 2003 on STS-107, the final flight of Columbia. She was one of the seven crew members who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated during its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on 1 February 2003.
The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. Founded in 1824, the Franklin Institute is one of the oldest centers of science education and development in the United States. Its chief astronomer is Derrick Pitts.
"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy.
Thomas Ustick Walter was the dean of American architecture between the 1820 death of Benjamin Latrobe and the emergence of H. H. Richardson in the 1870s. He was the fourth Architect of the Capitol and responsible for adding the north (Senate) and south (House) wings and the central dome that is predominantly the current appearance of the U.S. Capitol building. Walter was one of the founders and second president of the American Institute of Architects. In 1839, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a weekday podcast that originated as an hour-long weeknight news and political commentary program hosted by Keith Olbermann that aired on MSNBC from 2003 to 2011 and on Current TV from 2011 to 2012. The show presented five selected news stories of the day, with commentary by Olbermann and interviews of guests. At the start of Countdown, Olbermann told television columnist Lisa de Moraes:
Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news. ... News is the news. We will not be screwing around with it. ... As times improve and the war [in Iraq] ends we will begin to introduce more and more elements familiar to my style.
Terence Dickinson was a Canadian amateur astronomer and astrophotographer who lived near Yarker, Ontario, Canada. He was the author of 14 astronomy books for both adults and children. He was the founder and former editor of SkyNews magazine. Dickinson had been an astronomy commentator for Discovery Channel Canada and taught at St. Lawrence College. He made appearances at such places as the Ontario Science Centre. In 1994, the International Astronomical Union committee on Minor Planet Nomenclature named asteroid 5272 Dickinson in honour of his "ability to explain the universe in everyday language".
Germantown Friends School (GFS) is a coeducational independent PreK–12 school in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States under the supervision of Germantown Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). It is governed by a School Committee whose members are drawn from the membership of the Meeting, the school's alumni and parents of current students and alumni. The head of school is Dana Weeks.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Since 1996, he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.
Lawrence Francis O'Donnell Jr. is an American television anchor, actor, author, screenwriter, liberal political commentator, and host of The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, an MSNBC opinion and news program that airs on weeknights.
Anton Vamplew, is an English amateur astronomer, author, lecturer and media presenter of the subject.
Jack Horkheimer was the executive director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium. He was best known for his astronomy show Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, which started airing on PBS on November 4, 1976.
The 2007 Philadelphia mayoral election was held on November 6, 2007 when Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States elected Michael Nutter as the Mayor of Philadelphia starting in 2008. The incumbent mayor, John F. Street was barred from seeking a third term because of term limits. The Democratic Party primary campaign saw two well-known, well-funded Philadelphia congressmen – Bob Brady and Chaka Fattah – eclipsed by self-funding businessman Tom Knox and reformist former Philadelphia City Council member Nutter, who won by a surprisingly large margin in the primary election on May 15. He went on to face Republican Party nominee Al Taubenberger in the general election, which he won by a large margin and with the lowest voter turnout in a Philadelphia mayoral election without an incumbent since 1951. Mayor Nutter was sworn in on January 7, 2008.
Kenneth Linn Franklin was an American astronomer and educator. Franklin was the chief scientist at the Hayden Planetarium from 1956 to 1984 and was co-credited with discovering radio waves originating on Jupiter, the first detection of signals from another planet. He was often a local and national media figure including during Apollo 11, the first human mission to the moon, when Franklin was an on-camera astronomy expert for NBC.
Samuel Simeon Fels was an American businessman and philanthropist.
The University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC) based at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) is a consortium of nine University of California campuses and three Department of Energy laboratories. The consortium's goal is to support and facilitate original research and education in computational astrophysics and to engage in public outreach and education.
Faye Flam is an American journalist. She has written for Science Magazine and wrote two weekly columns for The Philadelphia Inquirer, including one on sex and one on evolution. Flam wrote a book on the influence of sex on human evolution and society. She teaches science writing and lectures on communication to scientific forums, and is a journalism critic for the MIT Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
Kusumbai Motichand Planetarium, the first projection planetarium in Asia, became operational at the New English School in Pune on 18 September 1954. It was named after the mother of Seth Motichand Shah, son-in-law of Seth Walchand Hirachand(1882–1953), the founder of the Walchand group of Industries. The venture of a planetarium building was possible because of the generous donation of Rs.50000 from Walchand Group in the early 1950s.
Miniverse is a documentary film that was released on the subscription video on demand service CuriosityStream, in partnership with production company Flight 33 Productions. Miniverse is hosted by former International Space Station Commander Colonel Chris Hadfield. The concept of the film is to bring the expanse of the Solar System down to the scale of the continental United States. In the film, Hadfield drives on a cross-country journey exploring planets and celestial bodies with a rotating passenger seat of famous astronomers, traveling from New York to California. The film premiered on April 17, 2017.
The Stroud Water Research Center is a not-for-profit organization performing freshwater research, environmental education, and watershed restoration; it is headquartered in Avondale, Pennsylvania. It was co-founded in 1967 by American scientist Ruth Patrick and philanthropists William Bolton Dixon Stroud and Joan Milliken Stroud. Studies at Stroud Water Research Center have contributed to the disciplines of river ecosystems and ecosystem ecology; it is the 14th ranked water security think tank in the U.S. according to the 2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index published by the Lauder Institute of the University of Pennsylvania.
