1994 in science
The year 1994 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.
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Archaeology and paleontology
- March 31 – The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull, significant in the study of human evolution.
- December 18 – Chauvet Cave discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet and other speleologists near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche department of southern France, containing some of the earliest known cave paintings of animals, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life.[1][2]
- The Australopithecus skeleton "Little Foot" is identified in South Africa.
Astronomy and space exploration
- July 16–22 – The fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact the planet Jupiter.
- July 21 – R. Ibata, M. Irwin, and G. Gilmore discover the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, considered the closest galaxy to the Milky Way until 2003.[3]
- October 12 – NASA loses contact with the Magellan spacecraft after a successful mission. The probe crashes into Venus shortly after.
- Asteroid 7484 Dogo Onsesn is discovered by Masahiro Koishikawa.
- 14032 Mego is discovered.
- 8C 1435+63 is discovered and at z=4.25 becomes the most distant known galaxy.[4][5]
Biology and medicine
- September 10 – Wollemia (the 'Wollemi Pine'), previously known only from fossils, is discovered living in remote rainforest gorges in the Wollemi National Park of New South Wales by David Noble.[6]
- October – First public demonstration of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.[7]
- December 15 – Publication of the "Fukuda" clinical description of chronic fatigue syndrome.[8]
- The Dingiso or tree-kangaroo of Western New Guinea is first seen by scientists.[9]
- Gilbert's potoroo is rediscovered in Australia having been thought extinct.
- Flora of China begins publication.
- The first gene linked to Alzheimer's disease is discovered. No new linked genes would be found until 2009.[10]
- The BRCA1 gene is cloned by scientists at University of Utah, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Myriad Genetics.[11][12]
- The Western Hemisphere is declared free of polio.
Chemistry
- November 9 – Darmstadtium first detected at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, under the direction of Prof. Sigurd Hofmann.[13]
- December 8 – The first three atoms of Roentgenium are observed by an international team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI in Darmstadt.[14]
Computer science
- January – Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", a hierarchically-organised website, while studying at Stanford University; in April it is renamed Yahoo![15]
- April 12 – Husband-and-wife law partners Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel post the first massive commercial spam on Usenet in the United States.
- July 5 - Jeff Bezos launches Amazon
- December 3 – Sony release the PlayStation fifth generation home video game console in Japan.[16]
- December 15 – Netscape launch the Netscape Navigator web browser, for which it creates HTTP Secure.[17]
- Leonard Adleman describes the experimental use of DNA as a computational system to solve a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian path problem, the first known instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm.[18]
- Penguin Books offer Peter James' novel Host on two floppy disks as "the world's first electronic novel".[19]
Earth sciences
- December 21 – Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano, dormant for 47 years, resumes eruption.
Mathematics
- September 19 – Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem: English mathematician Andrew Wiles devises a new approach to the final proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, sending his proof to colleagues on October 6 and submitting for publication on October 24.
- The tennis ball theorem is first published under this name by Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold.[20][21]
Molecular biology
- Green fluorescent protein is successfully expressed in C. elegans, starting its career as a fluorescent marker.
Technology
- May 6 – The Channel Tunnel, which took 15,000 workers over seven years to complete, opens between England and France. It is now possible to travel between the two countries in 35 minutes.
- August 16 – The world's first smartphone, the IBM Simon, goes on sale.[22]
- December 3 – The first PlayStation gaming console is released in Japan.
- The first high-brightness blue LED is achieved, an invention that earns the researchers a Nobel Prize in 2014.[23]
- QR code invented by Japanese company Denso.
Awards
- Fields Prize in Mathematics: Efim Isakovich Zelmanov, Pierre-Louis Lions, Jean Bourgain and Jean-Christophe Yoccoz
- Nobel Prizes
- Physics – Bertram N. Brockhouse, Clifford G. Shull
- Chemistry – George A. Olah
- Medicine – Alfred G. Gilman, Martin Rodbell
- Turing Award – Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy
- Wollaston Medal for Geology – William Jason Morgan
Deaths
- January 25 – Stephen Cole Kleene (b. 1909), American mathematician.
- April 17 – Roger Wolcott Sperry (b. 1913), American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- May 12 – Erik Erikson (b. 1902), German American psychologist.
- July 29 – Dorothy Hodgkin (b. 1910), British biochemist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- August 19 – Linus Pauling (b. 1901), American chemist.
- August 29 – Arthur Mourant (b. 1904), Jersiais hematologist.
- October 28 – Calvin Souther Fuller (b. 1902), American physical chemist at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
References
- Chauvet, Jean-Marie; Deschamps, Eliette Brunel; Hillaire, Christian (1996). Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 978-0-8109-3232-6.
- Clottes, Jean (2003). Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times. Paul G. Bahn (translator). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-87480-758-5.
- Ibata, R. A.; Gilmore, G.; Irwin, M. J. (1994). "A dwarf satellite galaxy in Sagittarius". Nature. 370 (6486): 194–196. Bibcode:1994Natur.370..194I. doi:10.1038/370194a0.
- Lacy, M.; Miley, G.; Rawlings, S.; Saunders, R.; Dickinson, M.; Garrington, S.; Maddox, S.; Pooley, G.; Steidel, C. C.; Bremer, M.N.; Cotter, G.; van Ojik, R.; Röttgering, H.; Warner, P. (1994). "8C 1435+635: A radio galaxy at z = 4.25". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 271 (2): 504–512. Bibcode:1994MNRAS.271..504L. doi:10.1093/mnras/271.2.504.
- Spinrad, Hyron; Dey, Arjun; Graham, James R (1994). "Keck Observations of the Most Distant Galaxy: 8C1435+63 at z=4.25". The Astrophysical Journal. 438: L51. arXiv:astro-ph/9411007. Bibcode:1995ApJ...438L..51S. doi:10.1086/187713.
- Woodford, James (2002). The Wollemi Pine: the incredible discovery of a living fossil from the age of the dinosaurs (rev. ed.). Text Publishing Co. ISBN 978-1-876485-74-0.
- "About the Cochrane Library". The Cochrane Library. Archived from the original on 2011-01-05. Retrieved 2011-01-25.
- Fukuda, Keiji; Straus, Stephen E.; Hickie, Ian; Sharpe, Michael C.; Dobbins, James G.; Komaroff, Anthony; International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study Group (15 December 1994). "The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Comprehensive Approach to Its Definition and Study". Annals of Internal Medicine. 121 (12): 953–9. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-121-12-199412150-00009. PMID 7978722.
- Flannery, T. F.; Boeadi; Szalay, A. L. (1995). "A new tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus: Marsupialia) from Irian Jaya, Indonesia, with notes on ethnography and the evolution of tree-kangaroos". Mammalia. 59 (1): 65–84. doi:10.1515/mamm.1995.59.1.65.
- Gallagher, James (2011-04-04). "Five more Alzheimer's genes discovered, scientists say". BBC News. Retrieved 2018-01-12.
- US patent 5747282, Skolnick, H. S.; Goldgar, D. E.; Miki, Y.; Swenson, J.; Kamb, A.; Harshman, K. D.; Shattuck-Eidens, D. M.; Tavtigian, S. V.; Wiseman, R. W.; Futreal, P. A., "7Q-linked breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene", issued 1998-05-05, assigned to Myriad Genetics, Inc., The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and University of Utah Research Foundation.
- Miki, Y.; Swensen, J.; Shattuck-Eidens, D.; Futreal, P. A.; Harshman, K.; Tavtigian, S.; Liu, Q.; Cochran, C.; Bennett, L. M.; Ding, W. (October 1994). "A strong candidate for the breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1". Science. 266 (5182): 66–71. Bibcode:1994Sci...266...66M. doi:10.1126/science.7545954. PMID 7545954.
- Hofmann, S.; Ninov, V.; Heßberger, F. P.; Armbruster, P.; Folger, H.; Münzenberg, G.; Schött, H. J.; Popeko, A. G.; Yeremin, A. V.; Andreyev, A. N.; Saro, S.; Janik, R.; Leino, M. (1995). "Production and decay of 269110". Zeitschrift für Physik A. 350 (4): 277–280. Bibcode:1995ZPhyA.350..277H. doi:10.1007/BF01291181.
- Hofmann, S.; Ninov, V.; Heßberger, F. P.; Armbruster, P.; Folger, H.; Münzenberg, G.; Schött, H. J.; Popeko, A. G.; Yeremin, A. V.; Andreyev, A. N.; Saro, S.; Janik, R.; Leino, M. (1995). "The new element 111" (PDF). Zeitschrift für Physik A. 350 (4): 281–282. Bibcode:1995ZPhyA.350..281H. doi:10.1007/BF01291182. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-01-16.
- Agence France Presse (2012-01-18). "Who is Jerry Yang?". NDTV. NDTV Convergence Limited. Retrieved 2013-05-27.
- "Business Development/Japan (1994~2004)". Sony. Archived from the original on 2011-07-03. Retrieved 2012-02-22.
- Walls, Colin (2005). Embedded software. p. 344. ISBN 9780750679541. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
- Adleman, Leonard M. (1994-11-11). "Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems". Science. 266 (5187): 1021–4. Bibcode:1994Sci...266.1021A. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.54.2565. doi:10.1126/science.7973651. JSTOR 2885489. PMID 7973651.
- "All Eight Roy Grace Novels by Peter James Now Available in e-Book Format in the United States: Author of "the world's first electronic novel" in 1994". prweb. 2013-01-31. Retrieved 2015-10-31.
- Arnol'd, V. I. (1994), "20. The tennis ball theorem", Topological invariants of plane curves and caustics, University Lecture Series, 5, Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, pp. 53–58, doi:10.1090/ulect/005, ISBN 978-0-8218-0308-0, MR 1286249
- Martinez-Maure, Yves (1996). "A note on the tennis ball theorem". American Mathematical Monthly. 103 (4): 338–340. doi:10.2307/2975192. JSTOR 2975192. MR 1383672.
- "World's first 'smartphone' celebrates 20 years". BBC. 15 August 2014. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
- Overbye, Dennis (7 October 2014). "Nobel Prize in Physics". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
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