Relativity

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

TONATICO, Mexico - Armando Guadarrama was navigating his taxi through the narrow streets of this central Mexico pueblo on a recent Saturday morning, some 2,000 miles from the Beltway. But like many here, Guadarrama was up-to-the-minute with the immigration reform push that is the talk of Washington. When he spoke of its odds, the 40-year-old could sound like a hard-bitten D.C. veteran, grumbling over a scotch at the Old Ebbitt Grill. He sniffed incredulously at President Obama's statement, a day earlier, that he was "absolutely convinced" that reforms would pass this year.

Jeff Lipsky is a seminal figure in independent film distribution, having helped bring the work of such now-revered directors as John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh to broader audiences. Though still a distributor - putting out recent films such as "Barbara" and "Sister" - he has over the past few years ramped up his output as a filmmaker himself. Putting aside his business sense, he has set out to write and direct a series of idiosyncratic, slightly perverse and personal films. With the latest, "Molly's Theory of Relativity," Lipsky presents a story with a theatrically heightened sense of reality (it could easily be a play)

Seven reputed Montebello-area gang members have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in at least half a dozen killings stemming from ongoing rivalries over drugs and turf, authorities said Wednesday. The arrests made by Montebello police and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents, coupled with several dozen federal and state indictments, are part of a bid to clear a backlog of unsolved gang homicides. The operation targeted Southside Montebello, a gang rooted in the community for half a century.

Among the oft-repeated predictions of Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity is that if a twin travels through the cosmos on a high-speed rocket, when he returns to Earth he will be noticeably younger than the twin who stayed home. Now physicists have demonstrated that the same is true even if the traveling twin is merely driving in a car about 20 mph. But in that case, when the twin gets home from the grocery store, he is only a tiny fraction of a nanosecond younger, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

In "Science Project of a Lifetime" (Feb. 24) I find that, after "four decades ... and $700 million," Gravity Probe B "arguably has had more delays, cost overruns and cancellations than any other NASA scientific endeavor." Also on Feb. 24 I read that, after "21 years and $6.9 billion," the "Army Cancels Comanche Helicopter." What is the matter with NASA that in twice as much time it has expended on this probe only about 10% of the cost of the Comanche? I suppose that the varying amounts may serve to illustrate a different theory of relativity.

The Pioneer 10 spacecraft, now farther away from Earth than any other device built by humans, will be asked to prove part of Einstein's theory of relativity later this year. If it does so, it will have succeeded where scores of scientists have failed.

Albert Einstein was one of the great minds of all time, but even he didn't know if his General Theory of Relativity was correct. But now Stanford University researchers hope to find out, or at least come reasonably close. Last week they took a big step in the university's quest when they doled out a $100-million subcontract to Lockheed Corp. to build a spacecraft for what they say could be "one of the great physics experiments of the 20th Century."

Squinting into the dark heart of the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered a star that orbits closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy than any other star yet observed. The relatively dim star, known as S0-102, is so close that it takes just 11.5 years to circle the black hole at speeds as high as 5,000 kilometers per second - or 1.7% as fast as the speed of light. The previous record-holder, S0-2, took 16 years to make its way around. A black hole is a star whose mass has collapsed to a point called a singularity.

In 1962, Francis Everitt, a restless young physics researcher from England, signed up at Stanford University for what he thought would be a "few years of entertaining work" on a space project. The goal was to put a satellite in orbit 400 miles above Earth to validate or disprove, once and for all, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Four decades and $700 million later, Everitt is still working on Gravity Probe B.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday said it planned to appeal a National Labor Relations Board judge's order to rescind disciplinary actions against five engineers and scientists. "Caltech respectfully disagrees with the decision and intends to appeal," JPL spokeswoman Veronica McGregor said in a brief statement. Administrative Law Judge William G. Kocol had ordered JPL, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, to remove disciplinary letters from the employee files of the five.

Dependable and steady, Maribel Ramos was a hard-charging Army veteran just a couple of weeks away from graduating from college with a degree in criminal justice. Beyond all else, friends agree, she was not the kind of person who'd simply walk away. But Ramos, 36, has been missing for 11 days, seen last on surveillance footage turning in her rent check at her apartment complex in Orange on May 2. She was reported missing the next day, a Friday, after she failed to show up for a speaking commitment at a veterans group event and then never showed at the softball game she'd played weekly for almost six years.

Over the objections of Los Angeles County mental health officials, a judge Thursday ordered an 86-year-old murder defendant to remain in the government's care and not be released to a family member. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Norman Shapiro said that Nattie Kennebrew, who in 2009 allegedly shot and killed a handyman and tried to kill the manager at the Hollywood apartment building where he lived, must remain at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino and that the county must pay for his care.

CLEVELAND - To most of his neighbors, Ariel Castro was an upbeat presence on a rundown street, a cheerful school bus driver who befriended local kids and popped into barbecues to say hello and have a beer. On Tuesday, they sought to reconcile that image with accusations that Castro had imprisoned three young women, abducted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, inside his slightly dilapidated house with the American flag out front. "I guess he had a great mask to cover a monster," Juan Perez, who lives two doors down from Castro, said Tuesday.

The history of Europe is written in its people's DNA. The Huns and the Slavs made incursions into Eastern Europe about 1,500 years ago. Migrants moved from Ireland to England in recent centuries. Populations in Italy and Spain have been comparatively stable. None of this is breaking news. But scientists were able to see it anew by examining the patterns of genes in 2,257 people now living in 40 countries on the continent. It's surprising "how much past history was still evident in the patterns we've seen," said Peter Ralph, a computational biologist at USC who reported the findings Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology.

After a three-week closure to complete safety work, the popular Space Mountain attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim is expected to reopen this weekend. Disneyland voluntarily closed the 36-year-old ride April 13 after state regulators, investigating the injury of a contract worker, found violations related to safety procedures and equipment for maintenance staff. Disney officials said Friday that they could not give an exact date for the reopening of the ride but hope to have it operating this weekend.

Einstein was right about relativity, again. NASA's Kepler space telescope has beamed back the latest evidence that light can be bent by gravity, an element of the theory of general relativity. It's not that astrophysicists expect observations to contradict Albert. But the findings represent the first time the phenomenon has been detected in a binary star system, according to NASA. In this case, a dead star, known as a white dwarf, bent the light from its partner, a small “red dwarf.”  The density of the much smaller white dwarf is far greater than that of its partner.

Regarding "Bitter Truths" [Dec. 21]: An indoors California girl allergic to nearly every animal, tree, blossom and blade of grass on Earth, having seen snow fall only three times in my life (the second time being in January 1962, the day Richard Nixon, campaigning for governor, paraded down Foothill Boulevard), I want to tell you how much I enjoyed the essays describing vividly frigid sea, winter sky and relativity of cold. Brrrr. Joan Jobe Smith Long Beach

Deanna Durbin, the singing starlet with the bubbly personality and the jewel-tone voice whose enormously popular movies were widely credited with saving Universal Pictures from bankruptcy during the Depression, has died. She was 91. Her popularity peaked by her late teens and by her mid-20s Durbin had left Hollywood forever, made wealthy by her relatively brief career. She died in April in France, said family friend Bob Koster, the son of Henry Koster, who directed Durbin in films early in her career.

A former Los Angeles County sheriff's jailer was convicted Friday on charges related to taking a $700 bribe and smuggling cocaine behind bars, prosecutors said. Remington Orr, 25, pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe and possession of a controlled substance in jail, both felonies. He allegedly had two ounces of cocaine when he was arrested at Men's Central Jail in February 2012. According to the district attorney's office, he agreed to a sentence of 2 1/2 years. In a separate case, Orr, who resigned from the department, also pleaded guilty to permitting a loaded firearm in a vehicle and driving with a suspended license.