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Chuck Brown pioneered the genre of Go-Go and became intricately connected with DC's cultural identity. Photo by James Hilsdon - Hilsdon Photography LLC

Washington, D.C. lost a musical icon yesterday. The legendary Chuck Brown died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore at the age of 75. Brown will be remembered for his decades of engaging live performances, his distinctive stage personality and his development of go-go music, a sub-genre of funk which incorporated R&B, early hip-hop elements and audience participation.

“He’s got such a legacy in music in creating a genre of its own,” says Dwan Reece, a curator of music at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. “The chanting, the call-and-response—it was, more than anything, one long party.”

Brown was born in Gaston, North Carolina in 1936; after moving around as a child, his family settled in Washington, D.C. in the early 1940s. As a boy, he hustled, shining shoes and selling newspapers in the street. During this time, he met many prominent African-American entertainers—he said that he once shined Louis Armstrong’s shoes at the Howard Theater. His musical talent showed early on, as he sang in church from the age of two and learned to play the piano by ear as a seven-year-old.

The performer endured a turbulent adolescence, in which he worked odd jobs, hopped trains as a hobo and served three years of prison time (the crime was assault, but Brown maintained that he acted in self-defense). While at Lorton Penitentiary, Brown rediscovered his love of music, teaching himself to play guitar and putting on shows for other inmates. Once he was paroled, he began performing in clubs and lounges around D.C.

In the early ’70s, Brown put together a band called the Soul Searchers and began innovating his signature sound: go-go. He blended funk, R&B, the call-and-response tradition from African-American church culture and other elements to create a highly energetic, danceable style that took the city by storm. “He started off playing with rhythm and percussion, and adding Latin instruments,” Reece says. “Then he learned that he could keep the percussion going between songs, so there was always some kind of activity, no break. He would chant, he would rhyme, and it became like a house party, a really familiar, down home environment.” His biggest early hits included “We Need Some Money” and “Bustin’ Loose.”

Brown’s close relationships with neighborhood audiences enabled him to take participation to a whole new level. “People would shout out birthdays, they’d send notes of things for him to say. he would call them out, and the audience would repeat back, and then he’d break into the next song,” Reece says. “There was an energy, and it was infectious. There was no line between the performer and the audience.”

Brown never became well-known nationally—his music had to be appreciated in a live setting to truly understand what made it so special. In D.C., though, where he played as often as six nights a week and sometimes twice a night, he became an icon. “He was so intricately tied to this city,” says Reece. “There are certain cities that are just defined by their music—when you think jazz, you think of New Orleans, and for R&B, you think Memphis. When you look at go-go, it is really the only music indigenous to Washington, DC.”

Although it never took off as a country-wide phenomenon, go-go had an indelible impact on contemporary American music. “It was definitely influential, especially with hip-hop,” Reece says. “His music involved samples, and was all about rhyming and the beat, and using energy to keep it going.”

Brown said that the genre took its name because “the music just goes and goes.” And just like his music, the legendary performer kept on going, regularly performing through his final years.

The National Museum of African-American History and Culture, set to open in its own building on the Mall in 2015, will feature an exhibition called “Musical Crossroads” that examines the influence of African-Americans on music. “The exhibit will have a section on music on the city, with go-go as a case study, looking at the role that place and community play in helping to define music,” says Reece. “We had been talking to Chuck Brown, and he was very excited about it, so I’m sad that he won’t be able to see it, but it will certainty illustrate his legacy in a larger way.”

"Jeopardy's" Power Players Week is filmed at Constitution Hall in DC. Photo by Kris Connor / Getty Images

Last month, at DC’s Constitution Hall, Alex Trebek read clues under the gaze of Abraham Lincoln. CNN host Anderson Cooper, NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others went for daily doubles amidst a patriotic set, in front of a giant map of the U.S, and in front of a live audience of thousands.

The event was the filming of shows for “Jeopardy’s” third-ever “Power Players” week: “Celebrity Jeopardy,” DC-style. The “Power Players” shows are airing all this week nationally.

“We’ll be doing the same thing we always do, except we’ll be doing it in front of ten times as big an audience as we usually do,” said Trebek in an interview earlier this month. “We’ve done shows at Constitution Hall on two previous occasions, and they have gone very well, so it’ll be a lot of fun.”

A total of 15 journalists, newsmakers and other notables participated in the slate of five shows, including former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, comedian and frequent contributor to “The Daily Show” Lewis Black, and NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell. All reported they were thrilled at the chance to participate in the series, which has been among the most popular game shows in the country for decades. “‘Jeopardy’ is omnipresent in television, and I worked in local TV news, so I always saw it,” O’Donnell said during the event. “Who doesn’t love ‘Jeopardy?’ Who doesn’t think Alex is cool? To be a part of it is amazing.”

Despite a resume that includes three Pulitzer Prizes, columnist and author Friedman professed to being nervous about the round just before it started. “I look at this as the journalistic Hunger Games—I just want to be a survivor at the end,” he said. “Just avoiding a ‘Youtube’ moment, that’s what it’s all about.”

Anderson Cooper, who had appeared on “Jeopardy” twice previously, winning once, said that one particular element of the game is most important than viewers might realize. “A lot of it is about the buzzer, and getting into a groove with the buzzer,” he said. “Obviously, knowing answers helps, but buzzing in at the right time is really very critical. That’s something you don’t see at home.”

During the commercial breaks, Trebek chatted with the audience, receiving heavy applause for his quips and amusing answers to questions.  ”When I get to talk to people in the audience, it’s a good back and forth exchange,” Trebek said. “And the best part, in DC, is that I’m not running for any office.” Audience members asked Trebek a variety of questions, including his favorite TV show apart from ‘Jeopardy,’ his favorite meal, and why he shaved his moustache. His answers, respectively: ‘Law and Order,’ fried chicken and rice, and “Because I felt like it!”

Each of the participants played for a charity of their choice, with a minimum of $50,000 for the winner’s charity, and $10,000 for each of the others. The various causes ranged widely, with projects supporting suicide prevention, biodiversity conservation and education of writing and the creative arts.

“The nice thing, obviously, is that the charity gets an amount of money no matter what,” Cooper said. “But, obviously, winning would be nice.”

Jeopardy: Power Players Week will be airing from May 14th through 18th. Check your local listings.

The IMAX camera shared majestic views of outer space to audiences down below

Starting in 1984, NASA’s space shuttle missions carried a device that visually captured space travel like never before. The IMAX camera provided sweeping, immersive views of Earth and intimate windows into the minutae of astronauts’ lives in zero gravity. The footage, collected over 17 missions, produced six movies, such as The Dream is Alive and Blue Planet—films that brought moviegoers as close as possible to the experience of what it’s actually like to orbit in space.

Now, with the shuttle program retired after two decades of service, two of the IMAX cameras come to their final destination: the Air and Space Museum, where the idea for filming space with IMAX technology originated in the first place.

“This building had barely opened in 1976 when our first director, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, had an idea,” said space shuttle curator Valerie Neal. “He proposed to NASA that an IMAX motion picture camera be taken into space aboard one of the early space shuttle flights. Having been to space himself, and having been to the moon and back, he saw that the IMAX camera could bring that experience to far more people than would ever have the chance to go into space themselves.”

One of the IMAX cameras used on the space shuttle missions, now part of the Air and Space Museum's collections. Photo courtesy of NASA/Paul E. Alers

Thirty-six years later, IMAX co-inventor Graeme Ferguson and museum Associate Director Peter Jakab presided over the donation of two of the cameras used aboard the shuttle to the museum last week. The battered black camera on display during the ceremony, which weighs about 80 pounds, made a number of journeys into space, documenting missions all the way up 1998. ”This is a marvelous acquisition for the Air and Space Museum,” Jakab said. “It’s an object that represents the merging of the creative arts with technology—which is the mission of the Smithsonian, the mission of NASA, and the mission of IMAX. It’s an object that allows us to tell a great many stories.”

To understand just how richly these stories can be told with IMAX technology, you really have to sit in front of the museum’s five-story-high IMAX screen and absorb the immense scale of outer space. Seeing a film produced with this camera is entirely different from seeing movies about space travel, or watching on a TV. The screen almost entirely fills your field of vision, so the astronaut’s views become your views, and the entire surface pops with vivid detail.

This is enabled by the cameras’ ability to take in an incredible amount of visual information, shooting film with oversized, 70 mm frames—providing more than eight times the area of traditional 35 mm film. “We focused on two things when designing the camera. The first was that it was a very large format, so it could gather a great deal of information. If it were digital, you’d say it had a lot of megapixels,” Ferguson said. “The other thing we worked very hard at was making it small, because with this format, in which a frame is about three inches wide, if you just scaled up a normal movie camera it would be enormous.”

Astronauts underwent extensive training to use the cameras, since they had been designed to be used only by expert filmmakers. “In some respects, it was an extremely primitive camera,” said Ferguson. “It had no mirror reflex—which movie cameras have had since the 30s—it had no zoom, it had no autofocus, or autoexposure, which every point-and-shoot camera like now has. It was probably the least user-friendly piece of machinery that ever went into space.”

The cameras were minimally altered for flight, with bumpers added to the sharp corners to prevent injuries. But using them was still an ordeal for astronauts: the film had to be re-loaded after every three minutes of filming and extra lighting was required to produce attractive footage.

Still, Ferguson says, astronauts were interested in getting a chance to use the camera from the very start. “They would come up to me and say, ‘Is there any chance of getting IMAX on my flight?” Ferguson says. “That really shows the power that The Dream Is Alive had in conveying the stories that the astronauts wanted to tell.”

Both of the cameras first flew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. The in-cabin camera will go on display in the museum’s “Moving Beyond Earth” gallery this summer. The payload-bay IMAX camera may go on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in the future, alongside the Space Shuttle Discovery, which will be welcomed into the collection on April 19.

As part of the Google Art Project, you can now virtually wander the halls of the American Art Museum and see remarkably detailed reproductions of hundreds of works

Have you ever wanted to wander the halls of the Portrait Gallery or Smithsonian American Art Museum—or see some of their works, such as Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Dodges Ridge,’ in exquisite detail—but can’t make it to DC at the drop of a hat? Now, thanks to the museums’ collaboration with the Google Art Project, you’ll have the opportunity to virtually experience all they have to offer from the comfort of your own home.

On Tuesday, as part of a major expansion of the project, the museums officially became participants, joining 150 other museums and institutions from around the world. As part of the collaboration, Google has created ultra high-resolution scans of 149 of the Art Museum’s pieces and 192 of the Portrait Gallery’s are now freely available for anyone to see online. For some museums, Google has selected a signature image to present at a size over 1 billion pixels (1 gigapixel), allowing viewers to examine the paintings down to remarkably minute details. By comparison, a typical digital camera produces photographs around 10 megapixels in size, or 1000 times smaller than a gigapixel.

Additionally, Google has used its Street View technology to provide remote viewers the chance to virtually tour the halls and galleries of the museums. The company’s special panoramic camera was brought in this past December to capture the interiors, and users can navigate it much as they might tour the streets of the city outside using Street View.

A panoramic camera is used to capture the museum's Kogod Courtyard. Photo courtesy of the American Art Museum

The project was started in February 2011 by Google, and now encompasses more than 32,000 works in total, including paintings, sculptures and drawings. The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York also became an official participant today, with more than 1500 pieces represented online. The Smithsonian Institution’s involvement started last year, when more than 200 works from the Freer Gallery were captured and made available as part of the first phase of the project. At the time, Julian Raby, the Freer and Sackler Gallery’s director, commended the level of detail made available in the online reproductions and felt the project would only increase interest in the museum’s offerings.

“The gigapixel allows you to see elements that you would really never ever see, certainly in traditional means of reproduction. You might see the crackle in the oil of a painting, you can sense the brushstroke in the artist’s hand and energy, you can see narrative details you would never see otherwise,” he said. “The traditional thing has been to say that any form of surrogate photograph, video, film will mean that people won’t come to the museums; actually, the experience is quite the opposite. In this particular case, I think it will create a sense of fascination that will engage completely new audiences.”

Check out the project to tour museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London in addition to the three four Smithsonian museums that have joined on. You can wander the halls, select your favorite pieces, and build your own virtual gallery that brings together works from around the world. Google encourages art students and teachers to use the content as educational material, and plans to continue expanding the project in future years to make as much art as possible available to anyone, anywhere—so long as they have access to a computer.

An artist's conception of a runaway hypervelocity planet. Image courtesy of David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

In 2005, Warren Brown of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory noticed something rather unusual in the sky: a star traveling out of the Milky Way galaxy at roughly 1.5 million miles per hour. The strange discovery could only be explained by an even stranger prediction, made nearly two decades earlier by an astronomer named J.G. Hills.

“He predicted that if you have two stars orbiting each other—a so-called binary system—and they get too close to the central black hole in the Milky Way, they will get ripped apart,” says SAO astrophysicist Avi Loeb. “One of the stars will go into a tighter orbit around the black hole, and the second one will be flung out of the galaxy.”

Since Brown’s 2005 discovery, at least 21 hypervelocity stars (as they’ve come to be called) have been observed speeding out of our galaxy. But only recently did anyone look to see if there might be hypervelocity planets, as well. “My collaborator Idan Ginsburg and I did some work on hypervelocity stars, and at some point, I was talking with him about perhaps looking into planets,” Loeb says. “One day, at lunch, it clicked: we could actually write a paper on them, because there is a method of finding them.”

Loeb had realized that a planet orbiting one of these hypervelocity stars could be observed by what’s called the transit method: when a distant planet crosses between its star and our telescope, the light of the star dims slightly, indicating the presence of the planet. First, though, he and Ginsburg had to determine whether these planets could theoretically exist in the first place. Their calculations, published last week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, went beyond even what he had suspected.

Hypervelocity planets can indeed exist—and according to the research team’s simulations, they may approach speeds as high as 30 million miles per hour, making them some of the fastest-moving objects in the known universe.

“We asked what would happen if there were planets around hypervelocity stars,” Loeb says. “So we started with a simulation of a binary system, and then sprinkled planets around each of the stars.” Their calculations showed that, if the binary star system was ripped apart by gravitational forces near the galaxy’s central black hole, a small percentage of the planets would stay bound to one of the stars, either following them on their journey out of the galaxy, or diving more closely into the depths of the black hole. The majority of planets, however, would be flung away from their parent stars, traveling even faster to the edges of the Milky Way.

“Their speed can reach up to ten thousands kilometers per second—a few percent of the speed of light,” says Loeb. “If you imagine a civilization living on such a planet, they would have a tremendous journey.” The voyage from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the observable universe, he says, would take 10 billion years.

The potential existence of hypervelocity planets is far more than a mere curiosity, since it would provide us information about conditions near the center of the galaxy, and if planets can even form there. “It’s a very unusual environment, because the density of stars there is more than a million times than the density near the sun,” Loeb says. “There is a very high temperature, and every now and then the black hole at the center gets fed with gas, so it shines very brightly, which could in principle disrupt a system that tries to make planets.” His team’s calculations showed that, if planets can indeed form in this area, they should be observable when bound to hypervelocity stars.

None of these planets has been spotted, but Loeb hopes that some will be found in coming years. Just as astronomers have recently discovered hundreds of extrasolar planets using the transit method as part of NASA’s Kepler Mission, they can scrutinize hypervelocity stars in much the same way to spot these runaway planets. And if things progress along the same time frame as J.G. Hills’ 1988 prediction of hypervelocity stars, Loeb can expect to have his predictions confirmed within his lifetime—sometime around the year 2029.