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‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’, directed by Steven Spielberg, a LucasFilm production, is coming out in theaters.

The number of democracies (defined by the Polity Project as having an index greater than 6.0 on their scale) has a new high at 52 (it was 36 in 1962, 12 in 1942, 29 in 1922).

Earthquake in Armenia: 8.0 on the Richter scale, 100,000 dead

US-Soviet summit in Moscow: ratification of the INF Treaty and reduction of conventional forces are discussed.

A slow withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan begins

Afghanistan, USSR, Pakistan, USA sign a peace agreement

Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, leader of the opposition to the military regime of Zia Ul-Haq, is appointed prime minister (later removed from power by a military coup in 1990)

In the United States, the Commercial Space Act deregulates space and levels the playing field between NASA and private commercial operators.

Launch of Venera 14, which lands on Venus and transmits 57 minutes of additional color panoramic images and soil analysis.

The P2 Masonic Lodge scandal erupts

El Salvador: Archbishop Oscar Romero is assassinated during Mass by right-wing extremists linked to the military government.

Gerd Heidemann of Stern learns from Fritz Stiefel, a Stuttgart industrialist and collector of Nazi memorabilia, about Hitler’s diaries and the Junkers 352 that crashed in East Germany in May 1945 with Hitler’s private material.

Second peak in Chinese CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP: 1.8. The first peak was that of Mao’s China and the Great Leap Forward: greater than 3.0. The second peak is due to industrialization resulting from Deng Xiaoping’s opening to free markets and the flow

The Shah of Iran leaves the United States, where he had taken refuge after leaving Iran, and heads for Panama.

Steve Jobs visits the Xerox PARC laboratories in Palo Alto. He manages to negotiate a deal with Xerox to gain access to Xerox technology (GUI/HMI, icons, mouse, pointer, etc.) in exchange for a $1 million investment in Apple from Xerox.

SLAC Labs, Stanford. On the night of December 6-7, 1979, Alan Guth wrote “A Spectacular Idea” in his notes. Guth intuited a mechanism capable of explaining how the Big Bang works. Certain types of particles, under certain conditions, can spontaneously aggregate into a state he

In Iran, 51 American hostages were taken by Khomeini’s followers; they were released after 444 days; unlike the similar occupation of the US embassy which had taken place only 9 months earlier, this time Khomeini did not intervene against the students as in the meantime

One of the Soviet military satellites with a plutonium reactor on board, crashes in Northern Canada.

Decriminalization of abortion in Italy

First test tube baby at Oldham Hospital, England

Ed Lewis discovers that the malformation of the bithox is caused by a mutation in a single gene, or a control gene

Space Shuttle Enterprise makes its first 55-minute flight at Edwards

The combined power of all electronic computers exceeds that of all human beings.

Charlie Chaplin, who went down in cinema history as Charlot, dies at the age of 88.

Moscow. The 540-meter-tall Oskantino TV Tower is completed.

Comet West is discovered by Richard West. In February 1976, it will break into several large pieces.

Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow name a possible Great Unified Theory (GUT) that possibly unifies the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.

Muammar El-Gaddafi Libyan President

100 miles south of Hawaii. The Hughes Glomar Explorer unloads the heavy and useless wreckage of the Soviet submarine K-129. It retains valuable material on board, including human remains, personal items, nuclear torpedoes, the vessel’s iconic bell, and more. Many of these items will be

Construction of the two World Trade Center skyscrapers in New York has been completed: they are 416m high.

Hewlett Packard launches the HP-35, a $395 pocket calculator featuring six integrated circuit microprocessors and a diode display.

United States. Clean Water Act.

Vietnam. The United States has 103,000 troops in the country, reduced to 69,000 by the end of April. Of these, only 7,000 are combat troops. No American units are participating in ground combat, but an entire fleet bombards the northern coast, five aircraft carriers cruise

Apollo 16 (Saturn V SA-511): John Young, Kenneth Mattingly, and Charles Duke complete the fifth lunar landing with the Command Module Casper and the Lunar Module Orion; they remain on the Moon for 2 days 23 hours and 2 minutes, walk on the Moon for

Arnold R. Bodner hypothesizes that strange matter (i.e. composed of “strange” quarks) is absolutely stable (i.e. with energy per baryon lower than that of the isotope 56 of Iron)

Gerard ‘t Hooft, a graduate student at Utrecht University, demonstrates the renormalizability of theories where there is a spontaneous breaking of symmetry, as in the case of the electroweak force.

United States. The Polaris missiles, based on nuclear submarines, become operational. They are missiles with 14 nuclear warheads each.

Structures revealing the presence of quarks are observed for the first time at the Stanford Linear Accelerator

Intense US bombing of North Vietnam

In a famous article in Scientific American, Martin Gardner explains John Conway’s game LIFE, or the more famous example of Cellular Automata. There are only two rules: if a cell is alive and is surrounded by two or three other living cells, it survives (otherwise,

Anwar El-Sadat Egyptian President

The Soviet Luna 17 probe delivers Lunokhod 1, an automated rover remotely operated from Earth, to the Moon. It is an unprecedented feat.

Bacterial enzymes, called restriction enzymes, cut specific DNA sequences, and become essential tools for specifically characterizing and manipulating DNA in vitro.

United States. Under the Nixon administration, a form of negative income tax, essentially a citizen’s income, was proposed, but it was defeated in Congress by Democrats who deemed the amounts too low.

The Apollo 11 crew is introduced to the public: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins

B-52 is flying over Thule on a Thule Monitor mission. It maintains constant visual contact with the American base in northwest Greenland, considered a primary target by the Soviets. The plane is loaded with four Mark-28 nuclear bombs. The co-pilot has placed foam rubber behind

Modern pharmaceutical chemistry is born. William Knowles (Nobel Prize winner in 2001) synthesizes L-dopa (levogira), made famous by the film “Awakenings.” Knowles administers the drug to his catatonic patients in New York in 1969, who had been suffering from encephalitis lethargica since the 1920s. For

The Soviet UR-500/7K-L1 launch vehicle explodes in a fireball upon launch, the lunar capsule’s rescue system does its job and the L1 ejects.

Von Frisch conclusively demonstrates color vision in fish and bees in controlled experiments

Grace Hopper, a software pioneer, was recalled to active duty in the US Navy at the age of 60, tasked with standardizing the use of COBOL and validating compilers. A special vote by Congress granted her permission to extend her duties beyond retirement age. She

Luciano Majorana, brother of Ettore Majorana, sent Ferrari the designs for an engine we would now call turbocharged. Ferrari responded, on letterhead, expressing doubts about the usefulness of such a device, especially in the complex engines built by the Maranello-based company.

Central African Republic: Colonel Bokassa takes power

Korolev, chief designer of the Soviet space program, is admitted to the hospital for a routine operation to remove intestinal polyps. During the operation, a large tumor is discovered spreading across his abdomen. Due to his broken jaw (from his imprisonment in the Gulag many

Comet Ikeya-Seki, as it passes around the Sun at just 1 million km, forms a spectacular tail, brighter than the full Moon, and then the comet (not the Moon) also fragments, creating two comets for the price of one.

Sunday. Winston Churchill dies. His last words, after being kept alive for days by artificial means, are: “I’m so bored with it all.” At his funeral, his Union Jack-draped coffin is honored by every European monarch, from Charles de Gaulle to Ike Eisenhower to David

The Soviets declare their system of photographic reconnaissance from space using spy satellites fully operational.

The United States has a program to use nuclear energy for space travel; with the ORION project, they will be able to theorize enormous spaceships capable of carrying 50 people to Mars thanks to continuous small nuclear explosions immediately behind the spacecraft; a testing complex

John Bell, an Irish physicist at CERN during his sabbatical year in Stanford, California, writes two famous articles on the revolutionary consequences of the entangled quantum state, which reveal that to see the entanglement you do not have to measure the quantity that reveals the

New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr finds another exact solution to Einstein’s equations, allowing for the existence of wormholes. A wormhole is a tear in space-time that connects us to another space-time. Thought to be a curiosity rather than a real possibility, it was later proven

The three-body problem was attacked by Vladimir Arnold and Jurgen Moser with the so-called KAM theorem, named after their initials and that of Andrei Kolmogorov, who in 1954 had provided the guidelines for its treatment. Henri Poincaré had already addressed the problem at the end

Eichmann’s execution by hanging in Israel

There are about twenty materials that can be lasered; by the end of the century there will be hundreds.

Franco-Algerian Truce. On March 18, 1962, after 130 years of French rule, France and Algeria signed a truce to end the Algerian War. In 1954, Muslim guerrillas of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) had launched a war of independence. In 1956, the FLN threatened

John F. Kennedy’s Moon Address to Congress: “I believe that this nation must commit itself to achieving, before this decade is out, the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

Atlas ICBM nuclear-tipped intercontinental rockets enter service

California. A B-52 carrying two Mark-39 nuclear bombs, just taking off from Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento, experiences problems. The crew ejects after directing the B-52 to a “safe” area. The B-52 makes a complete 260-degree turn and crashes into a barley field. The

Two MIT hackers create the first video game: SpaceWar

Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-1, its first uP

The United States announces the development of a fusion bomb that uses almost no fissile material and therefore causes almost no radioactive fallout.

United States. Dwight Eisenhower built the American highway system: the Interstates. He had seen the enormous autobahns in Germany during World War II and immediately understood their military utility for moving troops, tanks, and missiles. He built the Interstates with this in mind, and as

First shopping center (mall) opens in Edina, Minnesota

Modena. The heavy marble sarcophagus containing the remains of Saint Geminiano is opened for the third time. It had been opened only in 1106, and in 1184.

Albert Einstein, a year before his death, in a letter to his dear friend Michele Besso, declared: “I certainly consider it possible that physics is not actually based on the concept of fields at all, that is, on continuous structures; in which case nothing would

1:50 a.m. LP Beria is shot.

Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, complete the preliminary work to launch the judicial attack on Robert Oppenheimer. The work also includes the dismissal of Senator McCarthy, deemed too unreliable.

The London Agreement was ratified, in which Western countries forgave 50% of Germany’s debt (accumulated from two world wars, both caused and lost). This was a colossal sum, given that the total debt amounted to 100% of Germany’s GDP. Furthermore, the remaining debt could be

Britain’s first nuclear bomb: a 25kton bomb detonated off Western Australia; a total of 45 British tests.

Rocco Petrone arrives in Huntsville, Alabama. He is a 25-year-old US Army captain with a background in mechanical engineering, certified by the prestigious MIT, and a passion for rockets, cultivated at West Point. In Huntsville, he meets Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus. In 1952,

David Bohm considers the simplest case of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect (EPR), i.e. with entanglement between particles

Hoyle discovers that the carbon nucleus possesses an excited state just above the sum of the masses-energies of three helium nuclei; this allows the helium-beryllium system to resonate at that mass-energy; the resonance greatly prolongs the life of the unstable beryllium nucleus (a very unstable