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Completion of the GPS constellation and its full operation

The European Union is officially born (it replaces the European Community)

The two Americans David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, by graphing the number of families of marine animals over millions of years, discover the 5 great mass extinctions (439, 367, 245, 208, 65 million years ago)

Fossil Record 2 is published online with 7189 families of extinct animals and plants and 1083 families of extinct insects

Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem, and Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA, which would become the world leader in the production of GPUs for video games, and then the world leader in GPUs for Artificial Intelligence.

Police dismantle Shining Path leadership in Peru.

Hurricane Andrew destroys 135,000 homes on the US East Coast, causing “only” 44 deaths.

The Franco-American Topex-Poseidon mission is launched; it will be incredibly fruitful in scientific terms and will last 13 years and 62,000 orbits, until January 5, 2006.

Vassili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archives officer, handed over thousands of documents to the British secret service, copied one by one over 20 years of service. He would thus reveal virtually every KGB secret, including: 77 agents in the US (notably Robert Libka at the

Barcelona Olympics

COBE II is launched and sees differences of 10^-5K in the background radiation from point to point: it is the signature of the quantum fluctuations that represented the seeds around which the large galaxy clusters formed.

Traces of first trans-Neptunian objects found

MIT, Boston. After five years of research, Professor David Jewitt and his graduate student, Jane Luu, discovered the first body beyond the orbit of Pluto: 1992 QB 112, which would later be named Albion. The second such object would be discovered just a few months

Alexander Wolszcan and Dale Frail discover two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12; more than fifty extrasolar planets will be discovered before the end of the century.

First mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-49)

Mikhail Gorbachev visits Stanford University as a guest of George Schultz. He tells his “old friend” Schultz that the turning point that marked the end of the Cold War was the Reykjavik Summit, where for the first time, serious issues were discussed honestly and openly

Serbs control Vukovar and a third of Croatian territory

The first gene therapy procedure in Europe was performed in Milan and is the first in the world to use bone marrow stem cells.

David Fincher is the director of Alien 3 (Alien Cube)

Crisis in the European Monetary System. Capital inflows into emerging countries.

The Catholic Church apologizes to Galileo Galilei

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the monkey farm in Georgia (Caucasus), created by Stalin back in 1929 (by decision of the CPSU in 1926) with the aim of studying the possibility of creating an army of ape-men with intermediate properties between humans and

Similaun man discovered on the Austrian-Italian border

Evidence found for crater in Yucatan responsible for dinosaur extinction

Mikhail Gorbachev resigns

Alma Ata Agreement: 11 republics replace the USSR and Gorbachev is dismissed

The summit of the twelve European Union countries opens in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where monetary union will be decided. This is one of the final steps in the creation of the European Union. The heads of state of the dozen members of what was then

At the Bison Lodge hotel in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Nature Reserve in Belarus, Yelstin (Russia), Kravchuk (Ukraine), Shushkevich (Belarus), discuss the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its replacement with a Commonwealth of Independent States

A referendum in Ukraine officially sanctions the separation from the USSR with a large and overwhelming majority

The last of the 732 oil wells set on fire by Iraqis in Kuwait has been extinguished.

The KGB is dissolved and replaced by the FSB

Serbian troops intervene heavily in besieged Vukovar

George H.W. Bush announces the unilateral withdrawal of all short-range nuclear weapons. (The hawkish Cheney insists on “withdrawal,” not “destruction”—you never know…)

Following the failed coup by the hawks, the power of the CPSU crumbles; strengthened by the suppression of the coup, Yeltsin takes power and abolishes the Communist Party. The collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union; and the end of 46 years of the Cold

Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines: it’s the largest of the century. The U.S. base at Clark had just been evacuated as a precaution (marking the end of the U.S. presence in the Philippines).

NEC’s Sumiro Iijima Discovers Carbon Nanotubes

Operation Desert Hell begins: the 732 oil wells burned by Iraqis in Kuwait are extinguished (6 million barrels a day are going up in smoke).

The Allies established two no-fly zones in Iraq south of the 33rd parallel and north of the 36th parallel; over the next 10 years, American and British aircraft flew more than 350,000 missions over the no-fly zones.

First Gulf War: 382 American casualties, thousands of Iraqi deaths, $102 billion

Somali dictator Siad Barre flees the country and flees to safety in Nairobi, Kenya.

General George Lee Butler is appointed head of the American SAC (Strategic Air Command). In the first weeks of his tenure, he decides to scrutinize the SIOP: the list of nuclear targets on Soviet (soon Russian) territory. He finds bridges in the middle of nowhere

Iraq. With the first wave of American bombers departing from Saudi Arabia for Baghdad, there were also F-117 Stealth bombers, invisible to radar, carrying 1,000-kg Paveway laser-guided bombs, and 116 Tomahawk missiles in flight. The technology that guides them and the laser-guided bombs actually originated

UN approves resolution on use of force against Iraq: Operation Desert Shield begins

Austin, Texas. Robert Noyce dies. Nicknamed “the mayor of Silicon Valley,” he was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited with developing the first monolithic integrated circuit, or microchip, which fueled the

The disintegration of Yugoslavia begins: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Vojvodina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia.

Voting rights for women in the Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden (Switzerland)

Robert Folk of the University of Texas at Austin draws scientific attention to tiny spheroidal and ovoid objects found in sedimentary rocks near the Viterbo hot springs; these could be fossil nanobacteria, the calcified remains of organisms measuring 30 nm (while modern ones must measure

United States. Researcher Paul Elrich pays Julian Simon $576 for losing his bet. and John Holdren. Ten years earlier, in 1980, Simon had asked Elrich to choose a basket of any resource. If after ten years the real price of the basket increased, Simon would

Evidence is accumulating for the existence of many other planetary systems

Evidence for the existence of black holes is mounting: 34 supermassive ones will be discovered in the centers of galaxies by the end of the century, including one in the center of the Milky Way and another in the center of Andromeda.

US intervention in Panama to capture General Noriega, accused of drug trafficking; within days, the Marines will gain control of the country; the victims will be 23 Marines and 400 Panamanians; General Noriega will take refuge in the Vatican embassy and after a few days

Erfurt, Thuringia, East Germany (GDR). A crowd ransacks the offices of the secret police, the Stasi. The same thing happens that day in Dresden. Vladimir Putin is also present in the Dresden offices, and he will write: “The fact that Moscow remained silent gave me

Tiananmen Square. At the beginning of the seventh week of protests for democratic reforms in Beijing, the Chinese government authorized the army to forcefully disperse the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. By dusk on June 4, Chinese tanks had cleared the square: hundreds of people were killed

China. At a dinner during Richard Nixon’s private visit to Beijing, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin stood up without warning and recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in English.

Poland. Solidarity is legally recognized, and immediately participates in parliamentary elections and wins.

China. Chinese leader Hu Yaobang dies.

China. Hu Yaobang, recently dismissed for his ineffectiveness in quelling the initial student demonstrations, suffers a heart attack during a Politburo meeting. He dies the following week.

Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons: Cold fusion. It’s an electrolytic cell with heavy water (i.e., deuterium) and salts, and two electrodes, one of which is palladium. By passing an electric current through it, the hydrogen in one electrode apparently fuses, but the experiment won’t be

Yoshi Yamamoto, independently of Milburn, shows that a Friedkin gate can be implemented using photons and beam-splitters

In Italy, CICAP (Italian Committee for the Control of Claims of the Paranormal) was founded, inspired by James Randi and following in the footsteps of the American CSICP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). CICAP’s founding members were dozens of scientists

George Bush (former vice president of Reagan) at the White House

Iran. A series of mass executions of political prisoners is ordered and carried out. The supreme order comes from Ayatollah Khomeini, and they are carried out by Iranian officials throughout Iran, beginning on July 19, 1988, and continuing for approximately five months. The killings took

The 1.544 Mbps T-1 Internet backbone is being completed by Merit, IBM, and MCI with the Network Operation Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan; it connects 13 LANs (sites): Merit-Univ. of Michigan, Nat’l Center for Atmospheric Research, Cornell Univ., Nat’l Center for Supercomputing Applic., Pittsburg Supercomputer

Sussman and Wisdom use the Digital Orrery to demonstrate the Solar System’s chaotic nature, starting from Pluto’s orbit simulated over 845 million years. Stable deterministic chaos, or: unpredictability of position and velocity, but probable (but not certain) stability.

Climatologist James Hansen testifies in the US Senate and declares that he is certain that global warming is taking place and that there is a human contribution.

Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship, under internal and external pressure (from the United States), calls a plebiscite to potentially extend Pinochet’s rule until 1997. This time, however, Pinochet miscalculates. The United States supports the opposition, and international observers are sent to monitor the election. The “No”

US-Iran clash in the Persian Gulf

Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. First conference on Artificial Life: “The Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems,” organized by Christopher Langton, and featuring, among others, Richard Dawkins. Los Alamos, which saw the first demonstration of a new type of mass-death technology,

An international agreement, given the expanding ozone hole, bans hydrofluorocarbons. The treaty is ratified by 197 countries. The ozone hole is shrinking, and it is estimated that it will close completely by the mid-21st century. CFCs were discovered in 1930 by Thomas Midgley and his

Andy Warhol (USA) dies. He was a protagonist of the pop art movement.

Theodore A. Fulton and Gerald J. Dolan of Bell Labs build the first single electron transistor with a Columbus Island

Ken Ribet and Barry Mazur prove the Frey conjecture, thus linking the Tanyiama-Shimura conjecture to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

US supplies 70 Stinger missiles to mujahideen to shoot down Soviet aircraft

Chernobyl: Reactor number 4 goes from operating at 7% of its maximum power to 100 times its maximum power in four seconds. The 2,000-ton concrete shield atop it, called the pyatachok (the five-kopeck coin), begins to boil and dance. Then two explosions within four seconds

1:40 AM: One of the four reactors at the Lenin Nuclear Power Plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, explodes: 130 dead in the explosion, 500 rescue workers, and more than 5,000 in the following years (most from thyroid cancer, which stores iodine-131). The radiation released into the

FIAT buys Alfa Romeo from IRI

The Soviet Vega-2 probe passes 8030 km from the nucleus of Halley’s Comet.

The Iran-Contra scandal becomes public: parts of the US government sold weapons to Iran to raise funds to finance rebel factions (the Contras) against the communist regime in Nicaragua.

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is discovered

Raytheon operationalizes the first Raytheon Tomahawk Cruise Missiles