Celera and the international consortium (USA, UK, France, Germany, China) Human Genome Project announce the mapping of 95% of the human genome, in the presence of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
The journal Nature publishes the nearly complete (99.7% of base pairs) sequence of human chromosome 21 (the smallest of the 24, with only 250 of the 100,000 genes, chromosome 21 has 33,546,361 base pairs).
Russia. Presidential elections. Putin receives 53% of the vote. Communist Zyagunov, despite only getting 29.5%, receives far more votes than expected. Turnout is nearly 70%.
Two international teams using the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Australia and Chile have discovered the first black hole (6 solar masses) isolated in space within the Milky Way (all other black holes discovered so far have been either supermassive at the centers
Russia. Putin receives word from Yeltsin that Putin will become interim president before Yeltsin’s term expires in June 2000. Yeltsin wants to surprise his opponents and give Russia a new president for the new millennium.
The Panama Canal moves from the United States to Panama under the administration of a private company.
An Ariane 5 (ESA) launches into orbit the Newton-XMM, Europe’s large orbiting X-ray telescope
Europe is in decline, the NASDAQ is plummeting, the world is entering a new world war (the fourth, the fifth?)
Beginning of the Second Chechen War. Moscow. Another bomb attack on a residential building: 119 dead.
Ojai (Indian word for “Moon”), California. Pete Conrad, the third man on the Moon with Apollo XII, as well as Gemini 5, Gemini 11, and the Skylab space station, is in a motorcycle accident aboard his Harley Davidson. He arrives at the hospital fully conscious
The body of George Mallory is found on Everest at 8,155 meters. He had died there on June 8, 1924.
“Desert Fox” is launched, a new Anglo-American attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Sunday morning. Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet with Andy Bechtolsheim, a legendary Silicon Valley investor (and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, among other things). They had been put in touch by one of their Stanford professors, David Cheriton. Bechtolsheim senses the deal and writes a
Internet-related stocks boomed first on Wall Street and then in the rest of the world
Second Ethiopian-Eritrean war in just ten years; Eritrea manages to maintain its independence
Australia. Larry Page and Sergey Brin present their 20-page paper at a conference. It’s titled “The Anatomy of Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engines.” They don’t go into detail because they already have plans to exploit the idea for commercial purposes (Google).
A Serendip IV multichannel analyzer capable of handling 4 million channels for SETI searches is being installed at the Medicina radio telescope in Bologna.
Lunar Prospector detects the presence of at least 300 million tons of water ice in some craters at the lunar north pole
Larry Page and his officemate Sean Anderson brainstorm a name for Page’s new company. Sean suggests, “How about Googolplex? You’re trying to make a search engine that indexes a huge amount of information. Googolplex is a huge number.” Larry likes the idea and counters, “Why
Andrew Wiles receives the Wolfskehl Prize for solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Wolfskehl, whose life was saved by the problem, renewing his passion for life the night before a planned suicide, had opened the competition for the prize on June 27, 1908, worth 100,000 marks. In
San Diego, California. The Heaven’s Gate sect, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, upon hearing the news of the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet, recognizes the signal and believes it is being followed by an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Thirty-nine of them
Annapolis, United States. Englishman Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine for aircraft, dies; patent filed in January 1930. He moved to the United States in 1976.
The sixth Priroda module rendezvouses and docks with the Russian space station Mir.
Detroit, United States. Sixteen-year-old David Hahn, with incredible skill, attempts to build an innovative fast-breeder nuclear reactor in his mother’s backyard shed. He procures Uranium 233 (which would transform into Thorium 232, then Thorium 233, Protactinium 233, and finally Uranium 233 again). He wears a
Yuji Hyakutake discovers a new comet, which will be named Comet Hyakutake. It will return in 75,000 years.
7am UTC: The Galileo spacecraft probe is completely melted by the extremely high temperatures of Jupiter’s deep atmosphere.
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). A car bomb explodes in Riyadh, near the offices of several American military instructors, killing seven people (including five American civilians) and wounding sixty. This is the first attack of this kind in Saudi Arabia targeting foreign nationals.
Microsoft introduces Windows 95, its first windowing operating system (MacIntosh had had it for 10 years already)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, having returned to settle in Russia (no longer the USSR), addresses the Duma in Moscow. He died on August 3, 2008. In 2010, The Gulag Archipelago was adopted as a school text (recommended, not required), in the abridged version prepared by his widow.
Tel Aviv, Israel. Palestinian attack leaves 21 dead and 43 injured.
A pair of large fragments (of 21 total) from Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashes into Jupiter.
Moscow, Russia. Boris Yeltsin orders the White House in Moscow, where Communist Russian parliamentarians were barricaded after the attempted coup, to be bombarded and then occupied. A dozen T-72 tanks fire twelve rounds, ten of them blanks. The besieged rebels surrender, raising the white flag.
Tetra Pak moves Production and Research & Development of TetraBrik and TetraBrik Aseptic Machines from Lund, Sweden to Modena
The Galileo probe passes at 2410 km from the asteroid 243 Ida and its natural satellite Dactyl; Ida will appear to be composed of a monolith shattered irregularly by the impacts
The United States regained its leading position as a producer and exporter of integrated circuits. Japanese manufacturers’ market share fell from 90% in the late 1980s to 20% in 1998. And South Korea’s rising star, particularly Samsung, rose to prominence. South Korea became the world’s
An avalanche of “yes” votes in the referendums buries the old political power in Italy.
An unexpected spinoff of basic research in quantum physics: the World Wide Web. In April 1993, when there were only 600 websites in the world, CERN decided to publish the World Wide Web software, without asking for royalties or patenting anything. This decision would change
Mosaic is the first browser that is quick and easy to install and that incorporates images and hypertext.
American and international military intervention in Somalia to ensure the distribution of humanitarian aid
Mario Chiesa of the Italian Socialist Party is caught red-handed. Soon, Bettino Craxi, Severino Citaristi (administrative secretary of the Christian Democrats), and many others are implicated in the Mani Pulite investigation. There will also be some dramatic consequences with the suicides of Renato Amorese, Sergio
Constitution of the European Union. With the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, the nations of Western Europe finally unite for economic and political cooperation. Signed by the ministers of the European Community, the treaty calls for greater economic integration, a common foreign and security policy,
Boris Yeltsin, from the Bison Lodge Hotel in Belarus, telephones a stunned American President George H.W. Bush, telling him, “Today a very important event took place in our country. I wanted to inform you personally before you learn the news from the press. The presidents
At the Paris Peace Talks on Cambodia, an agreement is reached for free elections under UN supervision.