Jim Gray, a major contributor to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, has gone missing. From Rich Kron:
As many of you know, our colleague Jim Gray has been missing at sea since Sunday evening. He was sailing near San Francisco in good weather. He is a highly experienced sailor, and the boat is well-instrumented. So far no trace has been found, despite continuing, highly intensive searches. He has had an enormous impact on our Collaboration. He has generously spent a large fraction of his time over the last 5 years to work with us to create the SDSS. Our thoughts are with him and his family, and we hope for his safe return.
There is an effort to help with the search. Details from Alex Szalay:
We are processing hi-rez satellite images with a 0.8m resolution into 512x512 JPG tiles. They are placed on a website for visual inspection. If you have a bit of free time over the weekend, please help in inspecting a few images. It is a long shot, but everyone is getting pretty desperate. There is additional info, and in particular other images.
A news article on the search.
