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The world’s population stands at six billion. It was one billion in 1750, and three billion in 1950.

The average number of children per woman in the world is 2.7. The number needed to maintain a stable population is 2.1. In 1970, it was 4.5.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is established: it is a private American foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is considered the second largest charitable foundation in the world, with assets of $69 billion in 2020.

The Euro falls below parity with the Dollar: it takes 98 cents to buy one Euro.

Chevron, Texaco merger

Merger between Total, Fina, Elf

Fast-growing energy source: Natural Gas (Carbon/Hydrogen ratio: 1/4)

Russia. Yeltsin informs his aides of his decision to hand over the presidency to Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin bids an emotional farewell: “Many of our hopes have not been realized. What we thought would be easy has turned out to be painfully difficult. I would like

In the 20th century, 70 million people starved to death in massive famines. Eighty percent of these were victims of forced collectivization by communist regimes, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian centralized planning through five-year plans. These include, among others, the famine after the October Revolution in

A team of scientists from the UK, Japan, USA, Canada, Sweden reveal the genetic mapping of human chromosome 22 (545 genes and 134 known pseudo-genes), the second smallest, consists of 33 million base pairs and could contain up to 1000 genes.

China. First launch of the human-capable Shenzou capsule.

George Lucas directed The Phantom Menace (episode 1)

Moscow. A strange incident casts a dark light on the government’s position. In front of a building on Novoselskaya Street, a white Zigulì car stands, its license plate covered with paper and tape. A nervous-looking girl stands next to it. A bus driver calls the

Earthquake in Taiwan: 7.8 on the Richter scale, 2,000 dead

The UN has decided to intervene in East Timor to stop the massacres (over 7,000 deaths) by Indonesian militias against the Catholic majority.

Russian troops intervene in Dagestan (Caucasus) and then in Chechnya against Islamic separatists

Numerous attacks in Russia cause hundreds of civilian deaths and the destruction of entire residential buildings

RSA155 is also brought to heel with the Numerical Field Sieve. This result is achieved by a network of mathematicians gathered under the name of Kabalah.

Moscow, Russia. Yeltsin summons Putin. In Yeltsin’s recollections, the conversation goes like this: Yeltsin says, “I’ve decided, I’d like to offer you the post of Prime Minister.” Putin replies, “I’ll do what you tell me.” “Will you accept the highest position as well?” And Putin,

Launch of the Chandrasekar X-ray Space Telescope from the Space Shuttle Columbia

First MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) in space with Space Shuttle mission STS-93

Kosovo: NATO intervention begins in the Balkans – 30,000 air missions in over 70 days – 0.050 million ITL casualties: 3 allies – thousands of Serbs – thousands of Kosovars – 4 Chinese in the embassy – 1 million Kosovars deported

Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” is coming out in theaters.

Jimmy Wales, of Huntsville, Alabama, hired PhD student Larry Sanger to write the application for Nupedia, a user-editable online encyclopedia. But it wouldn’t be until two years later, with Ward Cunningham’s discovery of WikiWikiWeb, that they were able to give birth to Wikipedia.

The American satellite BATSE spots a gamma-ray burst, then the Italian Beppo-SAX resolves it better and transmits its exact position to a robotic telescope at Los Alamos, which within 20 seconds sees the flash in the optical beam as it fades; the following night the

Indonesian parliament appoints Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid as president despite Megawati Sukarnoputri’s party receiving the most votes.

United States. Peak fertilizer use. Beginning in 1999, agriculture began a sharp and steady decline in the amount of fertilizer and water used, along with a decline in cultivated area, despite the continued steady increase in tons of fertilizer each year, thanks to higher yields

Tommy Flowers, creator of the Colossus computer, dies at the end of 1943. It was the first electronic computer in history. He died without ever receiving due recognition for it, due to its military secrecy until the early 21st century.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google Inc.

Steven Spielberg is the director of Saving Private Ryan

Venezuela. Socialist Hugo Chávez is elected president. He will remain so until his death in 2013, when his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, succeeds him. The Chávez-Maduro era, especially from the second decade onward, will bring catastrophic economic decline, accompanied by human suffering among the population,

Apple launches the all-in-one iMac.

The United States has 10,763 nuclear weapons; the USSR has 10,764; a substantial parity decided by design.

England. The revolutionary contribution to the field of public key cryptography by Ellis, Cocks, and Williamson finally becomes public with a talk by Cocks. The enormous advances in this field had been made since 1965 at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham. Sadly, James

Hong Kong passes from Britain to China (with special status)

Progress resupply vehicle fails to rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir and violently impacts it. Poor investment and poor quality are exposed. It’s the beginning of the end for the Russian space station. Vassili Tsibilev is forced to pilot the Progress M-34,

Russia launches a powerful (and ill-fated) space telescope. Aimed at the ground, a Proton rocket launches the anonymous Cosmos 2344 mission into orbit. It quickly becomes clear that it is an innovative military satellite: Araks. The case is studied by Geoff Perry (a British physics

An international committee named element 105 as dubnium, not hahnium, as it had previously been informally called. And element 109 as meitnerium. In 1944, Otto Hahn had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments conducted in Germany that proved beyond any doubt that uranium

Operation Argo. U.S. state archives are open regarding Operation Argo, which 17 years earlier led to the release of American diplomats who escaped capture in Iran through the involvement of the Canadian Embassy and the cover-up of the science fiction film Argo.

China. Deng Xiaoping bequeathed to the members of the Chinese Politburo brief and succinct instructions for the future. They consist of two documents: one 24 characters long and one, for top-ranking officials, 12 characters long. Here’s the text: “Observe carefully; consolidate our position; calmly address

Man vs. Machine: the second match between Russian chess champion Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. The first match was played in Philadelphia in 1996 and won by the Russian 4-2. The second, in May 1997 in New York City, was won by Deep Blue

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the director of Alien – The Cloning

Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler of San Francisco State University discovered three planets around Upsilon Andromedae (a solar-type star 44 light-years away); over the next two years, they would discover more than 20 more planetary systems by investigating 500 nearby stars.

Houston, Texas. NASA inaugurates a grove planted with as many trees as astronauts who lost their lives, either in accidents or natural causes. They are all illuminated with white lights, except one, Pete Conrad’s, which, at the request of Alan Bean (his flight companion on

H5N1 avian influenza (bird flu) first transferred from chickens to humans in Hong Kong

The mad cow disease case explodes in England (the BSE virus had actually been present in the country since 1986); over the next two years, hundreds of thousands of cattle will be slaughtered; it will be discovered that it was due to remains of bovine

After many years of disputes over names, IUPAC publishes the definitive list of the latest elements discovered (in the last thirty years): 104 Rutherfordium, 105 Dubnium, 106 Seaborgium, 107 Bohrium, 108 Hassium, 109 Meitnerium. Then the ball will be passed to the Germans in Darmstadt,

Pete Conrad, the third man on the Moon with Apollo 12, is in Russia, in Yuzhno-Salkhalinsk, Siberia, for work. He is approached by the head of the American consulate, who asks him to meet an elderly woman who has been waiting for hours. “I’m Irina.

United States. During a ceremony, the innovative APL (Applied Physics Lab) team, which used to work for the Navy but is now competing with JPL for low-cost NASA missions, presented NASA Administrator Daniel Goldman with a check for $3.6 million. This was left over from

Wright-Patterson Air Force, Dayton, Ohio (USA). Dayton Peace Accords. End of the Bosnian War.

22:06 UTC: The Galileo spacecraft probe has already decelerated to Mach 1 and opens its parachute, causing it to further decelerate to 430 km/h.

22:04 UTC: The Galileo spacecraft probe plunges into Jupiter’s atmosphere at 170,000 km/h; it experiences 230 g of peak deceleration and its heat shield withstands temperatures of 14,000 degrees.

A University of Wisconsin team isolates embryonic stem cells in rhesus macaques.

The American Aerojet purchased and successfully tested a Soviet closed-cycle engine (which also used the exhaust gases from the precombustion chamber); the Soviet Energomash would later sell the Americans dozens of engines of this type, conceived almost 30 years earlier to take the Soviets to

Larry Page participates in an introductory orientation program at Stanford that includes a day in San Francisco. His guide is Sergey Brin. Sergey, a Jew born in Moscow to a poor family, arrived in the United States in May 1979. In the USSR, his father

Intel releases the Pentium Pro microprocessor (5.5 million transistors)

5:30 UTC: Explosive bolts on the Galileo probe free the probe, which will plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The Galileo entry probe then separates from the mother probe and begins its swoop toward Jupiter, where it will impact on December 7, 1995, collecting the first on-site

Serbian forces enter the UN-protected zone of Srebenica and systematically kill all the men and children and drive the rest of the population out of the village; the bodies piled up in mass graves amount to 8,000.

In Seattle, Wash., opens its first website www.amazon.com

Wolfgang Ketterle, Eric Cornell, and Carl Wieman at MIT achieved the first Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC: atoms at very low temperatures condense into a single object with peculiar properties) in the laboratory. Two thousand rubidium atoms at 0.000000001K reached the BEC for ten seconds, a single,

China. Jack Ma (Ma Yun is his real name) is hired as an interpreter by a Chinese-American consortium. During a trip to the United States, the two sides argue furiously, and he is kidnapped and threatened with a gun. Freed and penniless, he travels to

At FermiLab, two teams of nearly 1,000 scientists (USA, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Taiwan) announced the discovery of the Top Quark: it has a mass of 175 GeV (it weighs as much as a gold atom!) One of the last pieces of the Standard Model

The Budapest Memorandum, signed in the Homeland Hall of the Budapest Congress Center in the presence of, among others, US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken, prohibits Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus,

Jerry Yang and David Filo launch Yahoo!, a search engine through their ever-expanding list of websites.

US forces land in Haiti. 20,000 US troops landed without resistance in Haiti to oversee the country’s democratic transition. In 1991, during a bloody military coup, Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first freely elected president, was deposed and fled into exile. A triumvirate assumed

Giddings & Lewis’ Variax milling robot, Stewart’s first platform robot, is introduced at the Chicago machine tool show.

Geel, Belgium: First hydrogen-powered bus

After the end of the Cold War, nuclear deterrence no longer held up in international comparisons and new approaches to the conduct of war took hold. Particularly after the failed military intervention in Somalia in support of humanitarian operations, the United States adopted the Powell

Holland Ford of John Hopkins University uses the HST to look at M87 (an elliptical galaxy in Virgo) and finds evidence for a massive black hole (3 billion solar masses) 50 million light-years away.

The Hubble Space Telescope observes numerous protoplanetary disks in the Orion Nebula

USSR. Vostochny Space Base (formerly Svobodny). It was decided in 1994 by Boris Yeltsin to replace Baikonur, now in Kazakhstan. The first launch from the new launch pad took place on April 28, 2016. Launches from other launch pads have occurred since 1997.

United States. The climate in Congress is progressively worsening. The starting date, according to Gentzkow and Shapiro, is 1994, the year Newt Gingrich took over the leadership of the Republican Party with his “Contract for America.”

The inflow of capital into Mexico, following the European Monetary System crisis, abruptly stopped due to the tightening of American monetary policy.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is repaired in orbit in a spectacular mission.

Bosnian Croats fire on the Mostar Bridge, which collapses; it will be rebuilt in 2003.

Bill Clinton decides to withdraw American troops from Somalia

US President Bill Clinton reluctantly signs the decree terminating the partial construction of the SSC particle accelerator in Texas. Over 22 kilometers of tunnels have already been constructed, and $3 billion has already been spent. The tunnels will be used for other purposes, including private

Moscow, Russia. Boris Yeltsin proclaims the dissolution of both the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies and announces new elections for December. It’s an illegal move, as he later acknowledges. But he says he has no choice: the alternative is the disintegration of

Norway. Peres, Israeli Prime Minister, and Abu Alaa, Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, sign the Declaration of Principles. It will be followed by letters of recognition and, on September 13, 1993 in Washington, before US President Clinton, the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian

Charles H. Benet (IBM), Gilles Branard, Clude Crepean, Richard Josza (University of Montreal), Asher Peres (Technion, Israel Inst. Of Techn.), William K. Wootters (Williams College) discover a way to use quantum mechanics to teleport a photon (i.e., its quantum state)