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Hydrogen-feeding bacteria discovered deep in the Earth’s crust

Vladimir Putin, to facilitate the American military operation in Afghanistan aimed at neutralizing Al-Qaeda, opens his airspace to the American Air Force and uses his influence over Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to grant the Americans their military bases.

First American special forces in Afghanistan

In an address to the nation, George W. Bush officially declares the United States at war against the network of terrorist organizations and the states that support it

ISS: The routine was broken, for example, on September 11, 2001, when the crew could clearly see smoke rising from Lower Manhattan. That same day, Mission Control in Houston had to move to a bunker for security reasons, and control was handed over to Moscow.

The legal possibility of splitting up Microsoft has fallen away.

Ferrari, with Mikael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, won the Formula 1 drivers’ and constructors’ championships.

The average life expectancy worldwide is 66.6 years. In 1800, two centuries earlier, it was 28.6 years.

The average life expectancy in Europe and the United States is 80 years. In 1800, it was 40 years.

Bell Labs can successfully transmit and receive 1022 different frequencies (colors) on the same optical fiber

In the year 1500, there were 500 million Homo sapiens in the world, producing $250 billion in today’s dollars and consuming 13 trillion calories. Five centuries later, there were 7 billion Homo sapiens, producing $60 trillion and consuming 1.5 trillion calories. The population increased 14-fold,

United States. Beginning in 2000, the dematerialization of goods and value began, leading to a sharp and steady decline in demand for raw materials in developed economies. In particular, starting in 2000, consumption of aluminum, nickel, copper, steel, and gold began to decline dramatically in

Time remains the only truly fundamental thing, or the most expensive thing

There are 6.109 billion people in the world. The push for globalization continues in all sectors. In the auto sector, of the more than 2,000 companies that were born and grew in the 20th century, only seven large groups have survived. US GDP: $8.231 billion

NASA’s Aura satellite studies air quality in cities.

Shuttle Endeavour launches the second block of the International Space Station, Unity, into orbit.

NASA’s Deep Space 1 is the first space probe to successfully use an ion engine as its main propulsion (1800 hours of testing began on November 10, 1998).

Ji Qiang, Ji Shu-An, Philip Currie and Mark Norell publish in Nature an article on the two feathered dinosaurs Protoarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx, probably an intermediate stage between scales and feathers.

Indonesia. The Suharto regime unexpectedly collapses after 33 years. From then on, for the following decades, Indonesians actively participate in a series of democratic elections, which also bring anti-establishment figures to power, even defeating former generals.

Tutsis rise to power in Burundi; refugees in Rwanda and Tanzania return

Taiwan Strait. Third Taiwan Crisis. During a training exercise off Taiwan, the Chinese military launched three missiles, guided by the American GPS system. The first hit its target, but the second and third were lost, as the Americans, alerted to what was happening, quickly shut

23:06 UTC: The Galileo probe stops transmitting 1000km inside Jupiter’s clouds (it is at a depth of 160km below the 1bar pressure level), at 23bar of pressure and 152 degrees of temperature

Stanford University’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page create what will become the Google Search Engine

The Hubble Space Telescope releases the famous image of the Eagle Nebula (Pillars of Creation)

Mariusz Dabrowski and John D. Barrow show that if Einstein’s cosmological constant exists, however small, then there will always be a final oscillation after which there will be exponential expansion.

Two months before the elections, Silvio Berlusconi surprisingly announced that he had formed a new party.

General Steinhoff, a former Luftwaffe ace, dies. He fought in the skies of North Africa, England, Sicily, and Germany. He ended up under investigation by the SS because of his rebellion against the absurd orders of his superiors. After the war, he became the main

Korean cargo ship lost 34,000 hockey gloves during a storm in the Pacific; the path of the gloves, which would be found everywhere in the following years, from Vancouver to Vietnam, would greatly help oceanographers around the world to trace the path of marine currents.

The Hubble Space Telescope observes the approach and impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter.

Steven Spielberg finishes editing Jurassic Park

The situation in Somalia worsens as US bombs militia bases in Mogadishu.

Andrew Wiles’s first attempt to prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, and hence Fermat’s Last Theorem, is undermined by an inappropriate application of the Kolyvagin-Flach method.

Cambodia: The elections are won by one of the king’s sons, Ranariddh, who forms the new government. The Khmer Rouge continues to wage guerrilla warfare.

Three days of violent storms across the entire East Coast, from Florida to Maine: 270 dead in the worst storm of the century

Khrunichev Design Bureau (OKB-52, NPO Mashinostroeniye). This is Chelomei’s Moscow-based design bureau, which designs the Proton, Angara, Rockot, and Salyut systems. It was one of the first Russian aerospace companies to sign agreements with Western companies: Int’l Launch Services ILS was founded with Lockheed Martin

The Encarta encyclopedia (original code name: Gandalf), based on the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, sells 120,000 copies at $99 on CD-ROM during the Christmas holidays alone, 350,000 copies in the first year, and a million copies within two years.

Intel releases the Pentium microprocessor (3 million transistors)

Bush sends US troops to Somalia. President George Bush sends 25,000 US troops to Somalia. By the end of 1992, civil war, drought, and clan warfare had plunged the Somali population into dire conditions of hunger and disease. The United Nations launched a humanitarian mission,

The journal Science published an article on the successful sequencing of DNA from a 30-million-year-old termite, embedded in fossil amber. This sparked the imagination of Hollywood writers and directors. However, it was later demonstrated that they had likely sequenced snippets of human DNA that had

Yitzhak Rabin Israeli Prime Minister

Mujahideen in power in Afghanistan, Rabbani president

Assassination of Judge Falcone and his escort

Nevada Test Range (Area 51), inaugurated in 1951, closes

The “mimivirus” was discovered in an air conditioning duct in England; it is a huge virus (about the size of a bacterium) and with genetic material that is 80% completely unknown before.

Withdrawal of Moscow’s last (formerly Soviet) soldiers from Afghanistan following the collapse of the Najibullah regime. Cost of military operations in Afghanistan: >116 billion US$, tens of thousands of Soviet dead, 1.5 million Afghan dead.

Bobby Fischer emerges from relative obscurity to play a rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, then under UN embargo. He wins the match, a second time. To do so, he challenges his own US government, which condemns him for violating the embargo. Fischer never sets

Kildin Island, Russia: Off the Murmansk military port, the American submarine Baton Rouge collided with the Russian submarine K-276 Kostroma. The two apparently failed to spot each other in time to avoid the collision. The American was on a covert mission to intercept Russian communications

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has disclosed the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which for half a century used satellite data from the secret CORONA program to map Soviet nuclear and conventional capabilities. This played a crucial role in the Cold War,

The third degree trial of the mega-trial against the Mafia concludes, with 19 life sentences and sentences totaling over 2,000 years. It is the largest criminal trial ever held in the world. It will be followed by the attacks that will lead to the deaths

China. Deng Xiaoping declares that the program of economic liberalization must continue for at least a hundred years in China.

AIDS cases and AIDS deaths spike in the US

Scalfaro President of the Italian Republic

Grace Hopper dies at 86. After starting out as a math teacher, she spent a full career in the Navy. In 1983, she received the rank of commodore (a US Navy rank now called rear admiral) from President Ronald Reagan. Grace Hopper can be considered

The Clean Hands investigation in Italy uncovers a massive bribery scheme; the entire political class collapses.

Rebels seize power in Ethiopia and the Somali government collapses, handing power to clan militias

An era ends with the fall of the Soviet Union. 499 years after the discovery of America, Europe no longer has a global power. The only global power remains the United States of America.

Kremlin, Moscow. The ceremony in which Mikhail Gorbachev signs the dissolution of the Soviet Union takes place in a Kremlin television office, set up as if it were Gorbachev’s office. It is crowded with 27 American journalists, in addition to Russian ones. The Russian marker

India. Finance Minister Monmohan Singh presents a radical reform of the Indian economy, devaluing the rupee and drastically simplifying the elaborate licensing system for new businesses. In short, India (840 million people in 1991) fully enters the free market.

The China Shock: In 22 years, Chinese manufacturing exports have risen from 2% to 19% of the world total.

The Galileo probe passes just 1601 km from the asteroid 951 Gaspra

Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as General Secretary of the CPSU

Chinese mathematician Quidong Wang, who teaches at the University of Arizona’s Department of Mathematics, extends the partial solution to the Three-Body Problem found in 1912 by Finnish mathematician Karl Frithiof Sundman to any number of bodies. Sundman discovered that the presence of chaos, particularly in

Cuban troops withdraw from Angola

Vilnius, Lithuania. Fourteen unarmed people attempting to occupy the television tower are killed by the Red Army. 160 are injured. Gorbachev tries to avoid the Prague scenario, which would mean crushing the uprising in blood, which is, however, what the army generals hope for.

The United States has 18,306 nuclear weapons; the USSR has 29,606.

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa elected president of Poland

Galileo probe’s flyby of Earth passes just 960km from the planet

Latvia, following Estonia and Lithuania, also declares its independence from the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR, which was neither expected nor predicted by anyone, is still several months away.

The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia ends.

Tutsis fleeing Uganda start civil war in Rwanda (ruled by Hutus)

Christopher Conrad, son of Pete, the third man on the Moon with Apollo 12, dies at the young age of 28, of lymphoma.

The first gene therapy procedure is performed in the United States: it is performed on a child affected by SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency).

The Hubble Space Telescope is launched

The key to Chaos is the resonances that act as amplifiers of small differences

Romania: Following a popular uprising, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife are executed, broadcast on TV.

Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues at CERN create the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and launch the World Wide Web

Intel releases the 80486 microprocessor (1 million transistors), which incorporates the math co-processor

Voyager 2 passes at a mere 4,950 km above Neptune’s North Pole clouds: 27 antennas in New Mexico are added to the listening network. It observes atmospheric phenomena such as the Great Dark Spot and the Wizard’s Eye.

The first B2 Stealth flies

Carlos Saul Menem Argentine president