WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 (UPI) — President Barack Obama celebrated science with an astronomy night at the White House Monday night.
On the South Lawn of the White House, the president hosted the event to encourage kids to follow careers in sciences like astronomy. The president hosted the first astronomy night in 2009.
Among the guests were 11 former astronauts, head of NASA Charlie Bolden, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and the stars of the TV show Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Together with students and teachers from across the United States, current scientists and explorers got to mingle with aspiring scientists and explorers.
The president told the kids “Some of you might be on your way to Mars,” he said. “We just have to keep encouraging every new generation to explore and invent and create and discover. I know you’re not satisfied with being home to the last great discovery, you want to be home to the next great discovery.
“We have to watch for and cultivate and encourage those glimmers of curiosity and possibility, not suppress them, not squelch them,” Obama said. “Not only are the young people’s futures at stake, but our own is at stake.”
One of the teen guests was Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Texan who was suspended from school for bringing a clock he had made because his teacher mistook it for a bomb.
Mohamed got to chat with the president during the evening and told reporters his experience from the suspension was “Don’t judge a person by the way they look. Always judge them by their heart.”
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