Sciences

A postage stamp honoring the late Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck will be presented Thursday at a ceremony at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The timing seems appropriate, since one of his most popular films, the World War II action adventure "The Guns of Navarone," celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, director (J. Lee Thompson) and screenplay (Carl Foreman), and winning for special effects. "Guns of Navarone" is based on Alistair MacLean's novel about six men who are sent to the Aegean Sea island of Navarone to destroy a supposedly impenetrable Nazi military operation.

One of the longest streaks in television history ... will continue. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the ABC television network said Thursday that they had extended their licensing agreement by six years ? through 2020. The announcement comes just days before this weekend's 83rd annual Oscar gala on the network, and the new agreement keeps the Academy Awards telecast a fixture on ABC. "This contract ensures that the Oscar show will be an ABC tradition for 45 consecutive years," Tom Sherak, the academy's president, said in a prepared statement.

In a season where every upright consumer of pop culture is expected to have the knowledge to make a decent showing in their Oscar pool, or at least join in the dinner-party bavardage about who has the best shot at a statuette, Debra Ann Pawlak's book "Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men and Women Who Founded the Academy" would seem to have a natural readership. Although she does draw the curtain back on the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to reveal a cavalcade of greedy, feuding siblings ?

After he retires as chancellor of UC Berkeley in June, Robert J. Birgeneau will head up a national effort to study and help public universities in an era of reduced tax support, new technology and changing student demographics. Birgeneau, a physicist, is to lead the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' new initiative that will propose ways for the federal government, private industry and foundations to better aid state institutions, along with developing reforms the schools could undertake.

Walter M. Fitch of Culver City, professor of biological sciences at USC, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Fitch, who has taught in the school's department of biological sciences since 1986, is editor in chief of the journal, Molecular Biology and Evolution. He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals.

Charles Easton Rothwell, a drafter of the United Nations Charter and former president of Mills College, died at his home Friday. He was 84. Rothwell joined the U.S. State Department during World War II and had a hand in founding the United Nations. He was executive secretary of the 1945 conference in San Francisco that drafted the U.N. Charter. Rothwell obtained his bachelor of arts degree from Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Harvey Mudd College students are among the country's brightest, but that did not make it any easier for a group of incoming freshman to break the ice at a recent orientation breakfast. The thaw finally came when one student complained that people thought he was saying "Harvard Med" when he told them where he was going to college. Others chimed in with "Harvey Who?" They had all heard that one dozens of times. Even "Elmer Who?" had a familiar ring.