Knut Magne Haugland, 92, the last of six crew members who crossed the Pacific Ocean on board the balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki, has died.
The former Norwegian resistance fighter and explorer died of natural causes in an Oslo hospital on Friday.
Haugland, decorated by the British in World War II for helping prevent the German nuclear program from getting heavy water to make weapons, joined Thor Heyerdahl's expedition in 1947 as a radio operator.
The Kon-Tiki team sailed with basic equipment 4,900 miles from Peru to Polynesia in 101 days to prove Heyerdahl's theory that ancient mariners may have migrated across ocean stretches.
Jeanne Giovannoni, 78, a UCLA professor whose research helped expand understanding of the categories of child abuse and how social workers, law enforcement and community members respond to them, died Dec. 17 of lung cancer at Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center.
Giovannoni was best known for "Defining Child Abuse" (1979), a widely cited book co-written with UCLA colleague Rosina M. Becerra.
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