AS

Gerd Binning, Heinrich Rohrer invent the scanning tunneling microscope to see individual atoms

Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle: “No Boundary Proposal”: The universe is a finite sphere of space-time, without boundaries. The idea came to Hawking during a lecture at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican.

Embryonic stem cells isolated in mice for the first time

The last Soviet crew leaves Salyut 6.

Rebels storm the Spanish Parliament. In Madrid, Spain, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero and 200 members of the Civil Guard storm the Cortes, firing shots into the air and taking the country’s democratic government hostage. The conspirators, displeased with the rapidity of the democratization process initiated

Rome, February 4, 1981. Robert De Niro attempts to identify himself during a Carabinieri search. The officers, who have just stopped the taxi in which the famous actor was traveling, believe they are dealing with a Red Brigades member. The cause of the misunderstanding is

49 people die in an accident at a Soviet launch base during the launch procedures of a spy satellite.

Damascus, Arkansas. 6:47 PM. Civil authorities (Arkansas Office of Emergency Services) are informed of a fuel leak and possible fire at the Titan II complex.

Damascus, Arkansas. 6:45 PM. The hole in the fuselage is lowering the fuel pressure as it leaks, and the very heavy oxidizer tank sitting on top of it threatens to collapse on top of it, mixing the two and causing an explosion.

Damascus, Arkansas. Launch Complex 374-7 consists of 19 Titan II missiles, armed with 9-million-ton W-53 thermonuclear warheads, distributed over a 50-km x 100-km area north of Little Rock. The large area was chosen to make it difficult to destroy all the silos and allow for

Neil Armstrong resigns from the University of Cincinnati; he will devote himself to various collaborations with private companies including Chrysler, United Airlines, Thiolkol, and Purdue University (where he graduated).

In Israel, 7,652 patents were registered, while in Arab countries, a combined total of 367 were registered in the same period. In the following period, the figures will increase on both sides: in 2008, Israelis registered 9,591 patents, while Arab countries registered 5,657 (50 in

FIAT produces the “Panda”, which will still be a bestseller after 20 years

Following the Iran hostage crisis, US President Carter ordered a freeze on Iranian financial assets in the United States. Carter’s measures (blocking military supplies, oil imports, and funds) proved to be completely negligible for Iran.

Tsunami in Lombledn, Indonesia, with a 120m high wave

The American space station Skylab, now uninhabited for years, and after some adjustments to reduce the likelihood of impacting populated areas, re-enters the atmosphere. Some pieces splash into the sea in the southern Indian Ocean, and others even land as far away as Western Australia.

Voyager 2 flyby Jupiter

Cambodia. The Vietnamese occupy Phnom Penh. An 11-year occupation begins. The Khmer Rouge advances to the western part of the country.

Lockheed Martin makes first F16-A operational

Richmond and Smith hypothesize the extracellular nature of organelles (such as mitochondria) and microorganisms that now inhabit the cell; therefore seen as invading organisms then assimilated by the cell when the mode of reproduction of the parasitic genes becomes the same as that of the

Ericsson creates the first mobile phone as we know it today (the first ever is Motorola, 1973)

Philips and Sony study the commercialization of the Compact Disk

Development of the SCARA (Selective Compliance Arm for Robotic Assembly) robot at Yamanschi University in Japan.

Benoit Mandelbrot creates the famous Mandelbrot Set: practically a catalogue of Julia Sets: the black points of the Mandelbrot Sets give rise to non-connected Julia Sets (if the series 0, c, c2+c, (c2+c)2+c, … diverges)

Vietnam invades Khmer Rouge Cambodia and installs a pro-Vietnamese government.

Jim Jones and hundreds of his Peoples Temple followers commit mass suicide in Guyana. In 1977, Jones, an American pastor, had led his followers to South America, where he established a farming commune called Jonestown in the remote northwestern part of Guyana. On November 14,

Bill Gates and Paul Allen move their small company from Albuquerque to Seattle. They take a photo before leaving, which will become famous. On the long drive to Washington State, Gates receives three speeding tickets, two of them from the same police officer…

John Paul II (Carol Wojtyla) is Pope

Launch of Pioneer Venus 2, which enters orbit around Venus; it includes five different atmospheric probes that explore the atmosphere in five different regions of the planet.

General Wilbur Creech takes over Tactical Air Command. This marks a momentous cultural shift for the US Air Force, compared to the days of Curtis LeMay, when the “bombers” dominated strategy. Generals with fighter pilot backgrounds, who had experienced firsthand the mistakes made by the

Unimation introduces PUMA (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly)

Dr. Giulio Devita, editor of the Italian version of the book The Ultra Secret, wants to delve deeper into the issue of the Italian defeat at Matapan and discovers that the interceptions of Italian Enigma by the British at Bletchley Park allowed the Royal Navy

Vietnam joins COMECON, the economic bloc led by the USSR

Communist coup in Afghanistan

The Via Fani ambush (or Via Fani massacre) was a bloody terrorist attack carried out by Red Brigades militants on the morning of March 16, 1978, on Via Mario Fani in Rome. The attack was aimed at killing members of Aldo Moro’s security detail and

Israel occupies southern Lebanon

Salyut 6 mission. It will be occupied for 676 days.

Wernher von Braun died in Alexandria, Virginia, at the age of 65. He had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer two years earlier. Per aspera ad astra.

NASA makes the first drafts of the Jupiter Orbiter Probe mission, which will later become the Galileo mission.

The Apple II, the first fully integrated personal computer with both software and hardware, is priced at $1,298. It will sell 100,000 units in three years.

Salyut 6 cosmonauts remain in orbit for 6 months

Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Addelman of MIT devise a practical implementation of the idea known as RSA, the encryption and decryption algorithm based on the fact that decomposing a large number into its prime factors is a so-called intractable problem.

Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, of MIT, realize that prime numbers are the ideal basis for cryptography

US Congress approves funding for the Space Telescope born from a proposal by Lyman Spitzer

In 1967, Charles Misner assumed that the Universe was originally chaotic, but that friction and other factors later brought uniformity and homogeneity, leading to the current observed isotropy. Barrow and Matzner demonstrated in 1977 that this friction would have generated far too much heat, for

Jimmy Carter, for the first time in over a decade, increases the Pentagon budget, and in particular finances the development of new types of strategic weapons: the mobile Pershing II nuclear missiles, the Cruise missiles with jet engines instead of rockets to fly low and

Michel Henon discovers the Henon strange attractor: x=y+1-1.4*x^2; y=0.3*x

The Remote Center Compliance (RCC) device for inserting parts into the assembly is developed at Charles Stark Draper Laboratories, MA, USA

Robotic manipulators are used for the Viking 1 and 2 space missions

National Instruments is born in Texas

190 cities have more than 1 million inhabitants

Whitfield Diffie, Martin E. Hellman, and Ralph C. Merckle of Stanford University discover the principle of Public Key Cryptography (PKC)

United States. Substances Control Act.

In the United States, the CSICP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and its related magazine, “The Skeptical Inquirer,” were founded. James Randi would be one of the group’s main supporters and members, which would also inspire the Italian CICAP, promoted,

Philosopher Martin Heidegger dies.

Bill Gates, after Paul Allen accepted the job in Albunquerque, returned to finish his sophomore year at Harvard. He then went to Albunquerque to join Allen, then returned to Harvard for two more semesters, and, to make a long story short, he ultimately missed out

Soviet advisors and Cuban troops arrive in Angola to support Agostino Neto’s MPLA, which has just come to power after the withdrawal of Portuguese troops; UNITA, supported by South Africa, organizes armed resistance.

Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. 2.5 million dead.

The core of the RBMK reactor in Leningrad goes into partial meltdown, releasing a radioactive dose equal to about 5% of that of Chernobyl

paper by Teller and Konopinsky dated December 2, 1943, was made public. They estimated, with a safety factor of 60, that a nuclear explosion of 3 million electron volts could not ignite the Earth’s entire atmosphere. They also concluded that even a bomb with 1,000

William H. Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft

The 1MHz Rockwell 6502, the first single-chip microprocessor, is born.

Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discover that the binary pulsar PSR1913+16 consists of two compact neutron stars spiraling with decreasing periods according to the law of special relativity, which predicts a release of energy in the form of gravitational waves.

United States. Congress passes the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) Act, which requires American automakers to produce vehicles that consume less gasoline. Gasoline fuel economy drops from 15 miles per gallon in 1975 to 25 miles per gallon in 1983, despite an average increase in

Global deforestation of tropical rainforests begins to decline. After a peak of 300 million hectares per year, it rapidly declines to 100 million hectares per year (pre-industrial levels of the 18th century). Deforestation of temperate rainforests was already declining sharply, from over 400 million hectares

Vietnam. The war between North and South resumes after the Americans’ departure. The communists occupy the Mekong Delta.

Deng Xiaoping becomes the United States’ main interlocutor. Mao destroyed traditional China and left its ruins as building material for subsequent, definitive modernization. Deng Xiaoping had the courage to base this process on private initiative and the determination of the Chinese people. He abolished cooperatives

Lisbon grants independence to Angola

Magician (and skeptic) James Randi repeats Uri Geller’s most famous experiments before a panel of scientists from King’s College. The five scientists are ultimately stunned, completely unable to understand the tricks—which, by Randi’s own admission, are there. They write a letter stating that, in fact,

Carnation Revolution in Portugal: The military bloodlessly put an end to the regime led by Caetano, Salazar’s heir; power is assumed by General Antonio de Spinola, who, at the end of the year, passes it to General Costa Gomez.

Israel. Palestinian attack on the town of Kiryat Shmona: 18 dead and 20 injured.

plebiscite transforms Greece into a republic and prohibits the restoration of the monarchy.

Rome: A group of terrorists, the “Black September” group, pull out machine guns and take the police officers hostage. They take them down through the exit. A Lufthansa 737, an Air France jet, and a Pan American jet preparing for takeoff are parked on the

Comet Kohoutek is discovered by Lubos Kohoutek of the Hamburg Observatory, a Czechoslovakian astronomer who fled his country during the Soviet armed suppression of the Prague Spring. The comet will be observed by American astronauts on the Skylab space station and by Soviet cosmonauts on

Bill Gates applies to only three colleges: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. He gets accepted into all three. He chooses Harvard. He studies in a particular way, doing 36-hour sessions, then crashing and sleeping for 10 hours, then eating a pizza and going back to studying.

Kahn and Cerf refine the TCP-IP protocol: 32-bit IP address, etc.

During the Vietnam War, the USAF lost an average of one aircraft every 1240 missions, during World War II it was one every 95.

The second Soviet Salyut explodes on launch due to a problem with the Proton’s upper stage, after exiting the atmosphere.

On a street near the Manhattan Hilton in New York City, Motorola’s Martin Cooper made the first call with an experimental cellular phone, to Bell (then part of AT&T), the rival company in the mobile phone race. Cooper called Joel Engel, head of research at

Vietnam. South Vietnamese President Thieu announces that the ceasefire agreement has been reached.