Paul Walker, best known for his starring role in The Fast and the Furious films, died on Saturday afternoon in a single-car accident and explosion in Southern California, according to TMZ. He was 40 years old.

TMZ reports that the actor was in a Porsche that was driving in Santa Clarita, CA, when the driver lost control of the vehicle, which hit either a post or a tree and then burst into flames. They also say that their sources, some of whom confirmed the situation from the scene of the accident, said that Walker and another person in the car were killed.

The story has been officially confirmed – see update below.

Lou Reed, the so-called godfather of punk, whose embryonic sounds of that genre and combinations of avant-garde dirty rock and roll helped propel him to become a legendary artist by way of The Velvet Underground and his own solo projects, has died at the age of 71, according to Rolling Stone. The cause of death is unknown at this time, but Reed had undergone a liver transplant back in May [see Update below].

For the Brooklyn-born Reed, it ends a life that was labyrinthine, filled with color and mayhem, sadness, poetry, tender regret, and razor sharp aggression. Reed took early rock and roll and doo wop, and mixed it with the sounds and styles of the mid 1960s, the Andy Warhol New York City which was crystallized by way of illicit drugs, adventurous sexuality and exploring themes, and going to places unknown; not even The Beatles tread to some of the naked, raw narratives that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground went to in their songwriting.

Animation mogul Lou Scheimer died a few days ago at the age of 84. For most people, even rabid fans of the man’s work, his name remains pretty much unknown. In fact, for the most part, his death was pretty much under the radar, which is a bonafide shame.

Lou Scheimer was one of the original founders (along with Hal Sutherland and Norm Prescott) of Filmation, which for most children of the 1970s like me, saw as an absolute assembly line of Saturday Morning Cartoons, Fat Albert, cartoon adaptations of the Archie comics series, and the original Star Trek Animated Series (which almost had the entire original NBC-TV show cast voicing the characters) among them. For a generation weaned as youth in the 1980s, He-Man and The Masters of the Universe was the order of the day. Lou Scheimer was an executive producer on these aforementioned shows, and there’s a certain pop culture chill one gets when remembering seeing these programs as a child, accented by the instantly recognizable rotating circle logo, which was the Filmation visual brand.

Jan Kuehnemund, a founding member and lead guitarist of the all-girl hard rock band Vixen, passed away on October 10, 2013 from cancer. She was 51.

Instrumental in starting the group in 1980, the band was signed to EMI eight years later, and released a self-titled debut album that held its own in the male dominated hard rock/metal genre that was sonic stock and trade at that time. The songs “Edge of a Broken Heart” and “Cryin'” (not to be confused with Aerosmith’s single released a bit later) remain memorable hits for the band, who toured in support of headline acts like Bon Jovi. Vixen would ultimately go on to release two more records. The band broke up by 1991, but have reformed in various incarnations through the years, mostly with original members, the latest one being in 2009; the record Live in Sweden remains an aural document of those proceedings.

Dr. Ray Dolby, founder and guiding force behind Dolby Laboratories from 1965 to 2009, died on Thursday at his home in San Francisco, CA, according to an announcement by the company. He was 80.

The exact circumstances of Dolby’s death were not included in the announcement, but he lived with Alzheimer’s disease for several years and was diagnosed with acute Leukemia in July of this year. During those 80 years of life, he amassed a fortune of approximately $2.9 billion dollars, was awarded more than 50 U.S. Patents, and fundamentally changed how we watch and listen to media in the modern world.