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CINCINNATI (AP) — Al Lewis, who was known as “Uncle Al” on a long-running children’s television show that aired nationally in the 1950s, has died. He was 84. Lewis produced and starred in “The Uncle Al Show,” which ran daily from 1950 to 1985 on WCPO-TV. The show aired nationally on ABC affiliates on Saturday mornings over two years in the late 1950s. He died Saturday of natural causes at an extendedcare facility in Hillsboro, Ohio, said Craig Turner, of Turner and Son Funeral Home, which is handling arrangements. Dressed in a straw hat, a bow tie and an ever-present...

Two months ago, John McCain pulled Alaska Governor Sarah Palin from relative political obscurity and placed her into the world spotlight. Now, less then one week before the presidential election, Palin reflects on one of the biggest moments of her youth; winning her high school basketball state championship. Outside the Lines' Sal Paolantonio discusses the biggest game of her life with Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. 3:27 runtime

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the last surviving German rocket scientists who came to America after World War II and formed the engineering foundation of the nation's space program, has died. He was 94. Stuhlinger, who died Sunday, had been in failing health for several months, according to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Stuhlinger served as chief scientist for Wernher von Braun and was among the group of German scientists who moved with him to Huntsville in 1950 when the Army established the Ordnance Missile Laboratories. The von Braun team developed the propulsion system that helped NASA...

Pioneer spacecraft mystery may be laid to rest 14:30 15 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Valerie Jamieson, St Louis What is making NASA's twin Pioneer spacecraft mysteriously drift off course, apparently defying the laws of physics? A rigorous new analysis suggests ordinary heat emission can at least partly explain the wayward probes' strange trajectories.Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in the early 1970s and explored the outer solar system. But in 1980, mission scientists noticed that the spacecraft have unexpectedly drifted off course.Both spacecraft have been pulled a little harder than expected towards the sun, and since their launch, they...

NEW YORK - Wayne "Frosty Freeze" Frost, a hip-hop pioneer whose acrobatic performance with the legendary Rock Steady Crew in the 1983 movie "Flashdance" helped set off a worldwide breakdancing craze, has died. He was 44. Frost died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center after a long illness, said Jorge "Fabel" Pabon, a senior vice president of the crew where Frost and other so-called b-boys (for beat or break boys) made their name performing complicated and daring dance routines. "He was one of most charismatic b-boys that ever lived," said Benson Lee, director of the new documentary film "Planet B-Boy."...

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. - Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the "Big Bang" theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, has died. He was 86. Alpher died Aug. 12 in Austin, Texas. He had been honored by President Bush with a National Medal of Science in July, but was unable to attend the ceremony because of his failing health, Union College in Schenectady said in announcing his death. He had been on the Union faculty. The "Big Bang" theory holds that the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of...

The 'Pioneer anomaly' – the mystifying observation that NASA's two Pioneer spacecraft have drifted far off their expected paths – cannot be explained by tinkering with the law of gravity, a new study concludes. The study's author suggests an unknown, but conventional, force is instead acting on the spacecraft. But others say even more radical changes to the laws of physics could explain the phenomenon. Launched in the early 1970s, NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are drifting out of the solar system in opposite directions, gradually slowing down as the Sun's gravity pulls back on them. But they are...

Computer sleuths try to crack Pioneer anomaly 19:24 02 March 2007 NewScientist.com news service Stuart Clark Because the tracking system for the Pioneer probes changed so much since their launches in the early 1970s, researchers have to look at each data file individually to put them in the same format (Image: NASA/ARC) Scientists and engineers remain on course in their efforts to determine what caused the twin Pioneer spacecraft to apparently drift off course by hundreds of thousands of kilometres during their three-decade missions. Within a year, they expect to be able to decide whether this drift was caused by...

Sheldon K. Friedlander, whose work in identifying the sources of particles in Southern California smog led to new ways of studying and regulating air pollution, has died. Friedlander died Feb. 9 at his home in Pacific Palisades of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, his family said. He was 79. While a professor at the California Institute of Technology in the 1970s, he was among the founders of aerosol science - the study of gases and particles in the air. Friedlander discovered a way to analyze the chemical makeup of smog particles and trace what was creating air pollution at any given...

My daughter must do a group research project on an African-American pioneer for 8th grade Social Studies. Her and two others must also write a script and do a skit for the class. Anyone have any recommendations?

NEW YORK - Warren Mitofsky, a survey researcher who pioneered the use of exit polls to cover elections and helped develop the sampling method used in most modern telephone polling, has died. Mitofsky, who was 71, died Friday in New York City of an aortic aneurysm. Joe Lenski, Mitofsky's partner in exit polling for the last two national elections, confirmed his death Saturday. Mitofsky started conducting exit polls in 1967 for CBS News and developed the projection system and analysis system used by CBS and later by a consortium of news organizations that conducted national exit polls. "He was the...

NEW YORK - Dr. Vincent P. Dole, whose research in the 1960s established that methadone could be used to treat heroin addiction, died Tuesday. He was 93. Dole had suffered from complications of a ruptured aorta, family members said. A clinician at The Rockefeller University, Dole studied a wide range of human biological processes. But it was his pioneering work with methadone that earned the highest accolades. In 1964, Dole and research partner Dr. Marie Nyswander experimented with shifting addicts from crippling drugs like heroin and morphine to methadone, a synthetic drug far less damaging to the body. At the...

AL TAQADDUM, Iraq (May 8, 2006) -- Another day on the sand-bitten streets of a small town in Iraq lapsed for the passersby, who carelessly walked to and from their normal routine tasks. A few insurgents entered the town, choosing it as their safe haven while preparing their next strike against the U.S. service members. Cruising just below its ceiling at approximately 15,000 feet, a small unmanned aerial vehicle hovered over the dusty community just beyond earshot, as it tracked the insurgents to their current location with real-time video and relayed the information to the people who could do something...

The surest sign that Stanley Hiller Jr. was just a kid when he designed the first helicopter to fly successfully in the Western United States was the field on which he chose to test it in 1944: the football stadium of UC Berkeley. A novice helicopter pilot, he learned to fly the bright-yellow contraption dubbed the Hiller-copter while it was anchored to several cars. He wore what might pass for safety gear among 19-year-olds: a T-shirt and slacks.

New Circuit Judge Karla Foreman Wright, left, embraces Florida Supreme Court Justice Peggy Quince after Quince administered the oath during an investiture ceremony Thursday at the Polk County Courthouse in Bartow. Karen Destiny Moses, center, and her brother, Damien Foreman Moses, play with flags during Thursday’s investiture ceremony for their great aunt, Karla Foreman Wright. A group of children participated in the ceremony during the Pledge of Allegiance. BARTOW -- Karla Foreman Wright beamed Thursday as family members, friends, colleagues and well-wishers celebrated her pioneering achievements in the local judicial system. Wright is the first black circuit judge in...

Jan. 28, 1986, was a crisp, sunny Florida morning. A day filled with hope and pride, and the chance to once more show off American ingenuity and greatness. It was a day filled with expectations, and the big, bright confident smile of a young New Hampshire schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe. Then, just more than a minute after takeoff, it all grew dark. Millions of people watching on television could hardly believe that a manned space shuttle, something so routine for Americans, could go so horribly wrong in so few seconds.

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Col. Edward N. Hall, who as director of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile program helped develop the country's solid-fuel rocket technology, putting the United States decades ahead of other superpowers, has died. He was 91. Hall died Sunday at Torrance Memorial Medical Center, said his daughter, Sheila Hall of Calabasas. The cause of death was not immediately known. Thanks to Hall's immense knowledge of rocket propellants, the Air Force created its first solid-fuel ICBM in the late 1950s. His work helped switch the country's missiles from liquid fuel to solid fuel, which made them smaller, easier...

It began with the search for Planet X. By 1979, Pioneer 10 had accomplished its original mission to become the first Earth-born spacecraft to explore Jupiter and was on its way out of our solar system, flying toward the star Aldebaran — a destination it should reach some two million years from now. On its way out, Pioneer 10 became a useful partner in an experiment of celestial mechanics. By closely monitoring its trajectory, scientists might detect an unexpected gravitational tug that could betray the existence of the long-hypothesized Planet X. Based largely on unexplained motions in the orbits of...

SAN DIEGO (AP) - Robert Dale Reed, an aeronautics researcher who pioneered the "Lifting Body" and remotely piloted aircraft programs with NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in the 1960s and 1970s, has died. He was 75. Reed died Friday due to complications of cancer, NASA said in a statement Monday. Reed began his career with NASA in 1953. The "Lifting Body" program - his most recognized achievement - grew out of Reed's belief that a wingless craft could serve as an orbiting vehicle, re-enter Earth's atmosphere and land safely. Reed's research eventually provided guidance to the design of the Space...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species. Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago. Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York,...

The European Space Agency is considering a unique experiment that could explain strange gravitational phenomena in the outer solar system. Since 1998 astronomers have known that the space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 are following trajectories that cannot be explained by conventional physics. Launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to explore the outer planets, the Pioneer craft are now at the edge of the solar system, with Pioneer 10 being some 86 astronomical units (about 13 billion kilometres) from the Sun. But they are not quite where they should be, based on the gravitational pull of the known bodies...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Fred L. Whipple, a pioneer in astronomy who proposed the "dirty snowball" theory for the substance of comets, has died. He was 97. Whipple died Monday at a Cambridge hospital, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said Tuesday. Whipple proposed the theory in 1950, saying that comets consisted of ice with some rock mixed in, rather than sand held together by gravity, as was widely believed. Whipple's theory was an attempt to explain why some comets seemed to arrive at destinations earlier or later than predicted. Whipple believed that as a comet approached the sun, its light vaporized...

Gravitational anomalies An invisible hand?An unexplained effect during solar eclipses casts doubt on General Relativity “ASSUME nothing” is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than...

Air National Guard Col. Linda McTague has gotten pretty good at regarding herself through the eyes of others. She does not see a pioneer for women's achievements when she looks in a mirror. But she realizes that other people consider her to be a role model – a pioneer – for what women can accomplish in this country's military service. And she strives very hard to live up to those expectations, as well as to her own. McTague is in a good position to take that kind of stock in herself, because she is the first woman to command an...

Christian media pioneer Marlin Maddoux dies Popular radio host, author, founder of USA Radio Network ----------------------- Posted: March 4, 2004 3:25 p.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com Christian media pioneer Marlin Maddoux died today at the age of 70, according to the USA Radio Network, which he founded in 1985. Marlin Maddoux The network said Maddoux died at 11:45 Central time this morning in Dallas due to complications from heart-bypass surgery. Maddoux, president of the USA Radio Network, which has more than 1,300 affiliated radio stations nationwide, was an author and host of a daily radio program, "The Point of View,"...

BEIJING, Sept. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- China has successfully test-fired its first four-stage solid-fuel launch vehicle capable of putting small satellites into space, a spokesperson for the developer said on Wednesday. The spokesperson for China Aerospace Science & Industry Corp (CASIC) said that the successful test on Sept. 16 at north China's Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center makes China the third country in the world capable of developing such rockets after the United States and Russia. The newly-developed rocket is capable of putting up to 100-kg satellites into orbit around the earth for resources exploration, environmental monitoring and survey, scientific experiments...

Few Dead Astronauts By Michael Levine © 2003 Even as a Soyuz capsule safely returned two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut from the International Space Station today, I still hear people asking whether there’s anything in space that was worth losing the seven Columbia astronauts. Seventeen space travelers have lost their lives in the NASA space program – three on the ground in their Apollo One spacecraft fire in 1967, seven Challenger astronauts lost on blastoff in 1986, the seven Columbia astronauts lost on their final descent on February 1, 2003. We know of four Soviet cosmonauts lost...

<p>Edgar F. Codd, an IBM computer pioneer who created the ``relational database model'' that underlies a $7 billion industry of storing the world's online business data, died of heart failure at home Friday in Williams Island, Fla. He was 79.</p>

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday. What was apparently the spacecraft's last signal was received Jan. 22 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network. At the time, Pioneer 10 was 7.6 billion miles from Earth; the signal, traveling at the speed of light, took 11 hours and 20 minutes to arrive. The signal and the two previous signals were very faint. The Deep Space Network heard...

<p>Stanford University's Bradford Parkinson, a pioneer of the navigation technology that now guides everything from military missiles to misguided motorists, was honored Tuesday with the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the engineering equivalent of the Nobel Prize.</p> <p>Parkinson, a 68-year-old Stanford emeritus professor of aeronautics and astronautics, was instrumental in creating the Global Positioning System, which harnesses the power of 24 orbiting satellites to pinpoint the longitude and latitude of virtually any spot on earth.</p>

<p>It was America's first space shuttle, the one that proved it could be done -- that people could blast into space on a rocket and land like an airplane.</p> <p>The shuttle Columbia, known in NASA-speak as Orbiter Vehicle 102, got its name from a Boston-based sailing ship that sailed up the Columbia River in 1792 and later went around the world.</p>

My Uncle was a Pioneer in the 5th Marine Division and I have yet to get a full understanding of what it meant to be a Pioneer. What was the difference between Pioneers and Engineers? Were Pioneers unique to the Marines? Were Pioneers only active during WWII? Also, I saw a reference to Pioneers in the German army in WWII. What can the experts tell me?