FQ

If matter were stable all this time (but it isn’t…), then everything would be Fe56

The e+ positrons created by the p+ protons encounter the e- electrons and are transformed into energy. At this point, the 10^79 particles that made up the universe should be energy (…) Entropy—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—is the implacable winner. Uniform Chaos. It was nice

Quantum tunneling liquefies matter

The 10^80 p+ protons decay into e+ positrons (which annihilate with e- electrons producing gamma rays) and into pions (which also decay into gamma rays).

Daejeon, South Korea. South Korean scientists have announced a new world record for the longest time they sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius—seven times hotter than the sun’s core—during a nuclear fusion experiment, in what they say is a major breakthrough for this futuristic

Livermore, California. A major breakthrough has been announced by U.S. scientists in the race to recreate nuclear fusion. Physicists have pursued the technology for decades as it promises a potentially nearly limitless source of clean energy, and they have confirmed they have overcome a major

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their groundbreaking experiments on entangled quantum states, in which two subatomic particles behave as a single unit even when separated. The implications are far-reaching in areas such as secure

England. The Joint European Torus (JET) nuclear fusion experiment based in Oxfordshire, UK, has more than doubled the amount of fusion energy produced in a single “shot,” breaking a previous record that JET had held since 1997. Officials announced today that during an experiment in

The man considered the “father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb,” Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, has died at the age of 85 after being hospitalized with COVID-19. Dr. Khan was hailed as a national hero for transforming his country into the world’s first Islamic nuclear power. But

Natanz nuclear site, Iran. Thousands of centrifuges are destroyed or damaged by cyber sabotage. The centrifuges are used to separate “weapon-grade” uranium 235 (needed to make nuclear weapons) from uranium 238 (abundant in nature). Much of the complex is located up to 50 meters underground.

Iran withdraws from the nuclear limitation treaty signed in 2015.

Archangel, Russia. A nuclear accident occurs on a platform in the Arctic Sea during a Russian military test of a new nuclear missile. Seven engineers working on the new weapons system (which is not revealed) die. For a few hours, the nearby port city of

Midterm elections in the United States. Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives, their largest gain since 1974 (immediately after the Watergate scandal), while Republicans retain control of the Senate.

The Kepler Space Telescope has reached the end of its life and the end of its mission extension. It has discovered over 2,600 confirmed planets outside the Solar System.

Saudi diplomatic headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey. Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, is murdered and butchered. A Turkish investigation reveals that it was carried out by the personal guards of MBS (Mohammed bin Salman), the Saudi prince. Turkish intelligence will assign a name and role

Big Island, Hawaii. Kilauea’s eruption, which had begun 35 years earlier, in January 1983, suddenly ends.

In Africa, more people have a cell phone than have electricity at home.

Ataturk Airport, Istanbul. Three ISIS terrorists arrive at the airport by taxi, shoot people at the terminal entrance, and then blow themselves up. Forty-two people are dead, including 13 foreigners, and 239 are injured.

Havana, Cuba. Historic first visit by an American president in 88 years. Barack Obama meets with Raul Castro.

Raqqa, Syria. Jihadi John, the British-born ISIS foreign fighter responsible for the beheading of several Western citizens, is targeted by an American drone. He had been identified thanks to small drone helicopters brought to the scene and operated by members of the British special forces,

Independent sources (the U.S. State Department and German inspectors) confirm that ISIS is using chemical weapons (mustard gas) against Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq. Traces of this gas have been detected in shrapnel from mortar shells fired at the Kurds. Symptoms of mustard gas poisoning

Istanbul. Two armed men enter the courthouse in the Çağlayan district and take prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz hostage in his office. Kiraz is investigating the death of Berkin Elvan, the fifteen-year-old boy who was hit in the head by a tear gas canister during clashes

The European Rosetta probe successfully enters orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, after a 10-year journey and several orbital rendezvous. This is a European success and a success for the entire team led by Andrea Accomazzo in Darmstadt, Germany, who was named Scientist of the Year 2014

Italy. Matteo Renzi forms the new government. At 38, he is the youngest Prime Minister in the history of the Republic. The 16 ministers, eight women and eight men, have an average age of 48.

Netflix launches the “House of Cards” series. It’s not just a TV show. It’s the result of an in-depth statistical analysis and artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning) of customer movie preferences, which began a few years earlier when Netflix sent DVDs to customers,

Syria. Clashes escalate into civil war. The capital is under siege, and a suicide attack kills the Interior Minister, President Assad’s brother-in-law, the head of the secret service, and virtually the entire crisis unit coordinating operations against the rebels.

Emilia. 9:00 am. A second earthquake, measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale, struck just 7 or 8 km deep in the Modena area, striking workers at work. Several industrial warehouses collapsed. In two weeks of tremors, 17 people died and 350 were injured. Structural damage

The Libyan rebels, supported by the air force and NATO military advisors, entered Tripoli and within days had control of a large part of the city.

Space Shuttle Atlantis arrives at the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver the Russian Rassvet module and several other equipment and supplies. After 32 flights and 25 years of distinguished service, this is Atlantis’s final mission.

The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (pronounced ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl̥) in southern Iceland causes a huge ash cloud that closes most European airports for days.

A double car bombing in Baghdad’s Green Zone leaves 130 dead and more than 500 injured. The targets were ministries and government officials.

Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, leader of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, is killed by American commandos in Somalia. The car he is traveling in is hit by a missile fired from a helicopter. Witnesses say at least one helicopter lands and picks up

The Sri Lankan army encircles and exterminates the last resistance of the Tamil Tigers, thus putting an end to an insurgency that began in 1972 and resulted in over 70,000 deaths. Among today’s victims is the leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran. Tamils make

In 2008, Israelis registered 9,591 patents, while Arab countries registered 5,657 (50 in Iran). For comparison, in the period 1980–2000, Israel registered 7,652 patents, while Arab countries combined registered 367 patents in the same period.

Al Qaeda attempts to strike the world’s main oil hub: Abqaiq in eastern Saudi Arabia; the attempt fails and the attackers are all killed in the second barrage.

The number of malaria cases declined by as much as 75%. Between 2014 and 2016 alone, 582 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. The journal Nature estimates that 450 million cases were prevented between 2000 and 2015.

Sweet taste receptor also discovered in the gastrointestinal tract

2:44 PM UTC (3:44 PM Italy): Cassini disappears below Titan’s horizon, and Huygens ends its transmissions.

9:06 UTC (10:06 Italy): The Cassini spacecraft’s Huygens module enters Titan’s thick atmosphere at 22,000 km/h, west of the continent of Xanadu. Podo then takes hundreds of photographs from various altitudes and collects valuable scientific data. It lands intact and functional on Titan on a

Launch of the American Deep Impact probe towards the comet 9P/Tempel 1, which it will reach on 4 July 2005, hitting it with a projectile.

Moderate Abu Mazen elected president of the Palestinian Territories with 62% of the vote

Valentino Rossi wins his fourth consecutive 500cc riders’ title (his first with Yamaha after several years with Honda); it is his sixth world title including those won in the 125cc and 250cc classes.

Milan. Egyptian Abu Omar, from the mosque-study center on Viale Jenner, was abducted by American agents and transferred first to Aviano and then to Cairo. For this, the Americans and Italians of the SISMI were convicted of kidnapping by the Italian justice system. All this

Beverly Hills, California. Moon landing conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel chases 72-year-old astronaut Buzz Aldrin, along with a cameraman and a sound engineer, outside a hotel, accusing him of being a coward and a liar. Buzz, who had already been harassed by the same person several

Three Indian mathematicians: Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena, without presupposing the validity of the Riemann Hypothesis, demonstrate a test similar to the Miller-Rabin test, capable of establishing the primality of a number after a few checks.

The allure of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories is framed as one of the ways people explain the reality of certain events, attributing meaning to a fragmented and chaotic world characterized by uncertainty, and thus reducing anxiety. Two relevant studies in this regard are Graumann

NASA’s Grace satellite, DLR, studies the gravitational field as it relates to the melting of glaciers and the dynamics of the ice-covered surface.

Jan van de Lune, a retired Dutch mathematician and member of Te Riele’s team, has not completely recovered from prime number fever, and using three PCs he keeps at home, he demonstrates that the first 10 billion zeros of the Riemann zeta function fall on

Thanks to data collected by Galileo, evidence is accumulating of the presence of an immense ocean of salt water even under the ice of Ganymede (as well as Europa)

BMW sells Land Rover to Ford for $3 billion, shortly after which it will sell the remaining part of Rover for the symbolic price of 10 pounds.

Merger between Time-Warner (45%, which also owns CNN, CartoonNetwork, HBO, etc.) and AmericaOnLine (55%, which owns AOL and Compuserve)

Tecnost (Olivetti – Mannesmann) acquires control of Telecom Italia

NASA launches ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) to examine the composition of the solar wind.

Begin writing this Chronology.

Russia signs an agreement with Kazakhstan for the use of the Baikonur Cosmodrome at a cost of $115 million per year. Leninsk, the suburb built for cosmodrome workers, is officially renamed Baikonur, and Mission Control is named Korolyov.

TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile) invents the prepaid card for mobile phones.

Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa study black holes as objects composed of p-branes

Peter Shor of AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey and Andrew M. Steane of Oxford University independently show how to error-correct a transmitted frame at the quantum level, without ever reading the states of the qubits or even cloning them.

Government of Lamberto Dini

Shuttle mission STS-61 is launched, carrying astronauts Richard Covey, Kenneth Bowersox, Kathryn Thornton, Claude Nicollier, Jeffrey Hoffman, Story Musgrave, and Thomas Akers. The goal is highly ambitious: to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Solar panels, electronics, and gyroscopes are replaced, and corrective optics are

In a basement of the Accademia dei Lincei, a series of notebooks and scattered sheets of paper annotated by Guglielmo Marconi between 1890 and 1894 were found.

The Internet is being made public: it leaves research centers and the military sector to be accessible to all.

Bruno Pontecorvo dies

Syria invades Lebanon

General Colin Powell devised and implemented the so-called Powell Doctrine, based on the use of overwhelming force to achieve a quick victory at the lowest possible cost in American lives. It was actually largely based on the Weinberger Doctrine, developed by Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invades Kuwait

American Davies and Japanese Koshiba observed effects in cosmic ray neutrinos that demonstrated that neutrinos have mass, albeit a small one. They were awarded the Nobel Prize.

Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan. Red Army soldiers intervene in a demonstration and kill dozens of people in the city center.

China. Deng Xiaoping begins a gradual withdrawal from all senior positions. He is the first leader in Chinese history to voluntarily undertake such a step.

After almost half a century, the Soviets have acknowledged their responsibility for the massacre of 4,000 Polish officers who were prisoners, a massacre that until now had been attributed to the Nazis.

Hundreds of GDR citizens took advantage of a picnic organized by the Pan-European Movement to cross the border between Austria and Hungary and go to the West with the tacit consent of Hungary.

Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The American Geophysical Union meets. On the final evening, a group of people, including Alan Stern and Bill McKinnon, gather at an Italian pizzeria and spend the night brainstorming ideas for a space mission to Pluto. The technical difficulties are incredible, but

Magellan launches towards Venus

In the Southern Hemisphere, the blue whale population has been reduced, due to relentless hunting, to just 500 individuals, from the 250,000 it numbered at the beginning of the 20th century. The whales’ bodies are used to make margarine, soap, lubricants, and explosives (the glycerin

Jacques Laskar of the Bureau des Longitude in Paris demonstrates that the Earth’s orbit is chaotic over a period of 200 million years, meaning it is impossible to calculate where it will be in 200 million years.

The Kuiper Airborne Observatory, through careful observations during the transit of a star behind Pluto, allows us to establish the presence of a rarefied atmosphere.

American Gertrude Belle Elion receives the Nobel Prize for developing an innovative method for synthesizing drugs. She thus contributes to saving 5 million lives (estimate updated at the beginning of the 21st century).

Richard Lenski of the University of Michigan in East Lansing began a decade-long experiment with Escherichia coli bacteria, allowing them to evolve under constant conditions. By 2010, he had produced more than 50,000 generations. This was the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, which began with 12 strains

Oxford. Small samples of the robe held in Turin, believed to be the one in which Christ was wrapped, have been carbon-dated. It appears to be medieval, made between 1260 and 1390, with 95% confidence.

Mordechai Vanunu is already in jail in Israel; the article with his photos proving that Israel is building atomic bombs has not yet appeared in the Sunday Times.