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General Electric buys AVIO’s aviation division

Iran: The government news agency IRNA announces that a Kavoshgar rocket carrying a monkey was launched into space and successfully re-entered [in suborbital flight].

6:46 a.m. Italian time. An earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale causes 20,000 deaths and damages amounting to €235 billion. It is the costliest natural disaster ever recorded.

The Library of Congress has 28 million books containing 12 billion characters (equivalent to 12 terabytes). In 1993, there were 6 million books.

group of students at Appalachian State University scientifically understands why Diet Coke turns into a geyser when it comes into contact with Mentos candies: the candies’ porous surface acts as a catalyst, like a net capturing the bubbles dissolved in the Coke, which join together

A mixed Russian-American group in Dubna managed to produce as many as 3 atoms of element 118 (Organesson, the last one on the bottom right of the Mendeleev Table), and the same group will also produce 113 Nihonium, 114 Flevorium, 115 Moscovium, 116 Livermorium, 117

American and Iraqi forces launched a final assault on the city of Fallujah, killing 1,200 insurgents, 31 American soldiers, 6 Iraqi soldiers, 3 hostages freed, 400 prisoners, and the mutilated body of an unidentified Western woman.

The Dutch director Theo Van Gogh, famous for a film denouncing the condition of women in the Islamic world, is assassinated by a Moroccan emigrant, who had a piece of paper stabbed into his knife with the reasons for the assassination.

Al Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda cell carries out several attacks in Iraq against Iraqi police forces, killing more than 100 people, and beheading a South Korean hostage who was in Iraq as a translator for a South Korean contractor.

A suicide attack in central Riyadh left four dead and a five-story building completely gutted.

A triple suicide attack in Basra targeted three Iraqi police headquarters, killing 70 people, almost all of them civilians, including 17 children who were on their way to school.

Suicide bombing against a train loaded with commuters in Russia, on the border with Chechnya: 42 dead (including one attacker, another attacker escaped, two were injured) and 200 injured

The last of the 20 9/11 hijackers arrives in the US: Saudi Mohammed al-Kahtani. He landed in Orlando, but immigration officials refused to let him pass because he had a one-way ticket, didn’t speak English, and couldn’t explain what he was doing in the United

The Nasdaq continues its decline, touching the 1600 mark after reaching 5500 in March 2000.

The euro-dollar exchange rate is at an all-time low: 0.84, meaning the dollar is at 2305 lire.

114 people die when a Concorde, with its engines on fire, crashes into a Paris hotel.

A CORONA spy satellite (type KH-4B) is displayed publicly for the first time at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It is one of 142 satellites that provided valuable and precise information on all types of Soviet nuclear and conventional weapons. This satellite is now housed

Delta Force and American Rangers intervene to capture Aidid in Mogadishu, Somalia; the operation fails, with two helicopters shot down; 19 Americans die, while Somali militia members suffer more than 1,000 deaths; Ridley Scott makes the film “BlackHawk Down” from the episode.

The Mississippi River bursts its levees near St. Louis, the worst flood in U.S. history; an event of this magnitude occurs once every 500 years (the river’s flow has increased several hundred times its average).

Los Angeles. A riot erupts following the acquittal of four officers involved in the brutal beating of African-American Rodney King. The city is ravaged by violence, fires, and looting for a week. African-Americans are particularly affected, especially Koreatown: a neighborhood where Asian immigrants had managed

Microsoft introduces Windows 3.11

Bosnia and Herzegovina declares independence, begins war with Karazdic’s militias, composed mainly of and paid for by Serbia: the siege of Sarajevo begins

After the LAPD’s televised assault on Rodney King, black riots erupt in the city; several days of violence result in 40 deaths and $1 billion in damage.

The 45 Mbps T-3 Internet backbone is completed by Merit, IBM, MCI; it connects 3500 LANs together.

George H.W. Bush announces the unilateral withdrawal of thousands of nuclear weapons. This is the largest reduction in nuclear weapons. All US Army tactical weapons in Europe are removed, half of the Navy’s weapons are destroyed and the rest are removed and stored, 450 Minuteman

Galileo probe makes first flyby of Venus, passing just 10,000km from the planet

Donald M. Eigler writes IBM using single Xenon atoms

CERN is fully operational

Sumgait, Nagorno-Karabakh in Soviet Azerbaijan. More than three hundred Armenians are massacred by the Azeris: beaten to death with clubs, thrown out of windows, hacked to pieces with axes, or stabbed in the streets by gangs of unruly youths. The Red Army soldiers intervene after

Japan. The Christian mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, is the target of violent attacks from the far right for declaring that Emperor Hitorito was partly responsible for the war. Two years later, he is shot in the back by a hitman.

Ronald Reagan appoints Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve; he will remain in charge through Reagan’s two terms, Bush’s (senior), Clinton’s two terms, and Bush’s (junior).

Philippines: Cory Aquino elected president, ending Marcos’ military dictatorship that had lasted since 1965.

The first elements of the MIR space station (Russian Space Agency) are launched.

Vienna: Only three of the four attackers showed up at the airport for the attack, but they were identified by Austrian security and Israeli agents with Austrian permission. The police immediately opened fire, and the Palestinians returned fire. They managed to escape, but were caught

Hollywood, California. At A&M Studios on the night of January 28, 1985, 45 of the biggest names in pop music gathered to record “We Are the World,” written by Lionel Ritchie, to raise funds for famine relief efforts in Ethiopia. It raised $80 million, exceeding

Tim Berners-Lee returns to work at CERN. He had already worked there a few years earlier, and had attempted to realize his vision of connecting all the world’s computers via the Internet. Now he returns, tasked with collecting all the results of the experiments conducted

Gerhard Frey, a mathematician from Saarbrucken, makes a conjecture: if someone were able to prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture on the equivalence of elliptic forms and modular equations, he would automatically have also proved Fermat’s Last Theorem.

2:00 a.m.: Flight KE007 could have been shot down over the Kamchatka Peninsula; it had been identified there by two other fighters, but they ran out of kerosene before they could take action. The tanks were kept almost empty to prevent the pilots from escaping

Bolivia. After the democratic government of Hernán Siles Zuazo takes office, Nazi Klaus Barbie is arrested and extradited to France.

Kenneth Rendell, a handwriting expert from Boston, consulted by Koch of Stern who brings him two of Hitler’s diaries, concludes within a few hours that they are certainly a forgery.

The work of classifying all finite simple groups is completed: there are some families of classical groups and some exceptional groups of which the largest, known as “the monster”, has order 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000

Soviet military satellites: These are usually disguised under the generic name Cosmos, which also applies to many of the other launches. The Oko satellite constellation (Russian for “eye,” about a hundred launched since the early 1970s) monitors missile launches as an early-warning system. It was

Egypt. The Shah of Persia, who had been ill for some time, dies.

Rai 3, Italy’s third public television channel, is born.

Indiana University professor Douglas Hofstadter combines arts and sciences in his unexpected and unrepeatable bestseller “Godel, Escher, Bach.”

Horn of Africa: the Ogaden War breaks out: Somalia and Ethiopia, eternal enemies, nomads and mountaineers, Muslims and Christians, fight. The dictators Siad Barre and Menghitsu are both supported and supplied with weapons and military training by the Soviets, who, however, at the beginning of

A formula for calculating the complete list of prime numbers is written out in full for the first time. It contains 26 variables (that is, it must use all 26 letters of the English alphabet). Random values are inserted into the variables and the result

China. In a statement titled “Scientific Research Must Be Given Priority,” Deng Xiaoping radically changed the course of Chinese history by giving top priority to science and technology in China’s economic development, as well as to professional retraining and the encouragement of talent and individual

Starsky & Hutch premieres on ABC

Gerorgios Padadopoulos sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) in Greece

40 degrees North, 180 degrees West, North Pacific. 5,500 meters deep. The Clementine tool hooks onto the Soviet submarine K-129. After several hours of ascent, the claws gripping part of the submarine break, and two-thirds of the vessel’s body cracks and falls to the seabed.

OPEC raises the price of a barrel of oil to $11.65; Europe and Japan flaunt pro-Arab statements to avoid oil embargo

Coup in Chile: Pinochet overthrows Allende’s democratic government with the support of ITT after the nationalization of Chile’s copper mines.

A famous calculation shows that the first 3 million zeros of the Riemann zeta function fall on the straight line passing through 1/2.

First conversation between Mao and Nixon: diplomatic relations are reopened. The American compliments the Chinese for having transformed Chinese society, but Mao replies: “I haven’t managed to change it. I’ve only managed to change a few places near Beijing.” According to Federico Rampini, this visit

Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant, is the sole survivor of flight JU367, which was downed by a Yugoslavian terrorist bomb. Incredibly, she survives the explosion, the destruction of the plane, and the fall from 10,600 meters. She lands in a tree, and the toilet

The McDonnell Douglas/Martin Marietta and North American Rockwell/General Dynamics consortiums have submitted their proposals for the Space Shuttle orbiter: both projects have in common the use of an aluminum alloy structure, protected by non-metallic thermal insulation material; the choice is dictated above all by the

The theory of SuperSymmetry is developed which predicts extra spatial dimensions

United States. President Richard Nixon establishes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The decision to concentrate regulatory and oversight powers in a technocratic institution, with a strong scientific background and protected from political interference, will prove wise in the medium and long term. It will lead,

The first Rhyolite satellite, later named Aquacade, is launched. The program is still classified. A total of four satellites have been launched into GEO orbit, the last in 1978. The first is over Indonesia. These satellites are capable of capturing Chinese and Soviet microwave transmissions.

11:34 PM Italian time: The LM piloted by Neil Armstrong has difficulty docking. It immediately goes into gimbal lock (the inertial platform with the gyroscopes locks mechanically). This means the system becomes automatically uncontrollable. The Geminis couldn’t have gimbal lock because they had a fourth

The US Navy deploys its first JFK-class aircraft carrier.

An uninhabited Vostok probe (fortunately!) after a successful launch accidentally automatically triggers the self-destruct command.

Paris. During a state visit by Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani to President Charles de Gaulle, the latter praises France’s preparations for the launch of the first artificial satellite from France. Fanfani, handsome as the sun, says he’s happy for them and that the Italians

Mario Tchou, an electronics engineer at Olivetti, dies in a car accident at just 37 years old while traveling to Ivrea to discuss a project for a new transistorized hardware architecture. Tchou’s sudden death, coming a year after Adriano Olivetti’s untimely death, marked the end

group of Cuban exiles backed by the CIA attempts to land in Cuba to spark a counter-revolution; poorly armed and poorly organized, the operation fails and the exiles are all killed by Castro’s soldiers in the Bay of Pigs.

The United States has six competing, funded intercontinental ballistic missile projects. The US Army has Wernher von Braun’s Jupiter (manufactured by Chrysler), the US Air Force has the Thor (very similar to the Jupiter, but made by Douglas Aircraft), and three others: Atlas (General Dynamics),

Von Braun’s Jupiter C rocket flew 5,300 km in the South Atlantic, reaching an apogee of 1,097 km at a speed of 25,700 km/h; its fourth stage, which would have allowed the launch of a satellite, failed because it was sabotaged by American intelligence because

Melbourne Olympics

Vietnam. American military advisors replace the French.

Systems developed for the remote manipulation of radioactive material, patents by Goertz (1954) and Bergs-land (1958)

Alpher and Herman, developing an idea of George Gamow, calculate that the ratio between the density of the Universe and the cube of its temperature is a cosmic constant.

Soviet Union. The military takes control of the Kaputsin Yar base.

The United States presents a plan (the Baruch Plan) for nuclear arms control to the United Nations. It is rejected a few days later by the Soviet Union. And a few weeks later, the Baker underwater detonation occurs at Bikini Atoll, targeting 71 ghost ships,

Yugoslavia. Mihailović, leader of the Croatian Chetniks, is tried and executed.

Japan. Doctor Noboru Hagino begins a serious scientific study of the disease affecting the Kamioke Mine families. By superimposing the epidemiological and hydrological maps of the area, he discovers the cause in the mine. It is cadmium, which flows downstream in the hydrogeological system, is

Atomic energy negotiations lead to the launch of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission

Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre publishes Existentialism as a Humanism

Radio astronomy: Frances Elisabeth Alexander discovered radio signals from the Sun, and in 1967, Jocelyne Bell-Burnell recorded periodic radio pulses (nicknamed LGM Little Green Men) emanating from stars later called pulsars. Previously, in 1937, Grote Reber had built the first radio telescope in Illinois and

The American Spitzer proposes to put telescopes into orbit