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Mars Pathfinder explores the Martian soil in Ares Vallis

The UN approves the “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,” which states that “…in Islamic countries, Sharia law is the sole and exclusive source of reference for human rights.”

Serious economic crisis in Southeast Asia

bombshell news story has gone viral: the Riemann Hypothesis has been proven! It turns out it was an April Fool’s joke by Professor Enrico Bombieri, one of the leading researchers involved at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Merton and Scholes won the Nobel Prize in Economics (Fischer Black died in 1997) for the Black-Scholes equation, which describes the price of a financial derivative. The formula was subsequently used and abused, with the conditions for its validity being forgotten, contributing to subsequent financial

Comet Hale-Bopp passes by. At its peak, it loses 400 tons of water per second, about 100 times the amount Halley lost at its peak in 1986. Its nucleus is enormous: a full 30 km across. The spectacle in the sky is its two tails:

The SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project identifies a strong signal of possible alien origin, but this signal will never be repeated.

The Human Genome is mapped

Harrison and Thomas publish a study on the appeal and subsequent spread of conspiracy theories, referring to normal motivational processes and the ways in which we normally and continuously construct representations of the world by processing information about social reality.

DengXiaoPing dies, JiangZemin succeeds him

The sixth generation of CPUs is born: Intel Pentium II (7.5 million transistors), AMD-K6

Artificial Intelligence (AI): The LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) technique is invented: Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, which stores and forgets information about inputs, thus alleviating problems that plague RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks).

Bill Clinton confirmed at the White House

The University of Basilicata awards Rocco Petrone an honorary degree in mechanical engineering. This opportunity flatters Rocco Petrone in the States, but after some hesitation, partly due to his advanced age and partly due to an innate reluctance, he decides not to undertake the journey,

Intel Corp., in collaboration with the Department of Energy (DOE), announces that it has built a one-teraflop supercomputer.

Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs returns to Apple Computers Corp., 11 years after his departure. In late 1996, Apple announced its intention to bring cofounder Steve Jobs back into the fold, 11 years after he left the company, by acquiring his startup NeXT for $429 million.

Earthquake in Emilia (VII on the Mercalli scale, 5.4 on the Richter scale), epicenter in Correggio

Partial solar eclipse

Feathered dinosaur fossils have been discovered. Confirmation is presented to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The species is named Sinosauropteryx (Chinese winged lizard).

President Clinton signs the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a total ban on nuclear testing, including underground testing. This signature is said to have been made possible by quantum-level modeling of the bomb and its surrounding environment on a supercomputer recently built at Sandia National Labs

Basic principles are discovered that make error protection possible for quantum computers, both classical bit-flips and superposition-destrying errors.

The Iraqi army’s invasion of Kurdish territory provokes retaliation from the United States.

General Aidid is killed in Somalia

Larry Page’s web crawler project, called BackRub, now uses half of Stanford University’s internet bandwidth. Page’s idea is simple and ingenious: use the same criteria used for scientific articles to rank the importance of a website—that is, count how many other web pages link to

General Dynamics delivers the first Seawolf-class nuclear submarine (USS Seawolf SSN 21); the same class includes USS Connecticut (SSN 22), USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23); the next in line is the Virginia class (USS Virginia SSN 774, delivered 2004, USS Texas SSN 775, delivered 2005,

The Vatican promotes Darwinian evolution from “hypothesis” to “theory of science”

Monsanto researchers in France, looking for molecules similar to aspartame but without its allergenicity, discovered Neotame, 8,000 times sweeter than sugar.

Atlanta Olympics

Paul Gage and David Slowinski announced the discovery, using the Cray supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California, of their seventh record-breaking prime number: 2^1257787 – 1, a 378,632-digit number. From this point on, the era of supercomputer dominance ends and the era of applications

The Ariane 5 launcher (ESA) explodes 37 seconds after launch due to a software bug on a recycled Ariane 4 launcher.

Hubble Space Telescope Observes First Deep Field

Russia. First and second rounds of elections. Boris Yeltsin wins the runoff with 64% of the vote to Zyuganov’s 41%. To prevent a communist return to power, Western governments, led by the United States, finance Yeltsin’s election campaign. This is the first time the American

Huge amounts of money flow into Congo (formerly Zaire) for coltan (a tantalum and niobium-based mineral, highly sought after for the manufacture of cell phones). This was a country without a government and embroiled in an ongoing war. The years from 1996 to 2003 were

Congo (formerly Zaire) also holds 60% of the world’s coltan, a tantalum-niobium mineral highly sought after for the manufacture of cell phones. The rapidly rising demand for coltan, and the sudden, enormous availability of liquidity, are thus compounded by the ongoing, murky conflict, caused by

The Rwandan government falls. Hutus flock to Congo in search of safety. The conflict soon spreads, involving nine nations and two hundred tribal groups, reawakening ancient hatreds and resentments. Congo (formerly Zaire) also possesses 60% of the world’s coltan, a tantalum and niobium mineral highly

Romano Prodi to government after the Olive Tree’s victory in the elections

First cases recognized of the deadly variant of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (vCJD), thought to be a consequence of BSE (mad cow disease).

Beginning of the mass application of genetically modified crops: in 6 years, crops will grow to 53 million hectares in 13 countries: USA, China, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Germany, Spain; mainly soybeans, corn, and rapeseed.

First fully decoded eukaryotic (cell with nucleus) genome: the yeast Saccharomyces Cervisiae

Comet Hyakutake Passage (I Saw It!)

Mission STS-75 with Italian astronauts Cheli and Guidoni on board; the Italian Tethered satellite is tested; the concept works, but the (American…) cable breaks.

United States. NASA’s NEAR probe, powered by a Delta II rocket, launches to explore the asteroid belt: Mathilde (June 27, 1997, a debris mass about 50 km in diameter) and Eros (December 20, 1999, an elongated body), on which it will land on February 12,

Yahya Ayyash, known as The Engineer, leader of Hamas, is killed by a cell phone packed with explosives

Galileo spacecraft launches probe that dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere and begins primary mission

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.

17:46 UTC: The Galileo probe passes just 892 km from Io and performs a flyby to slow down.

Steven Spielberg is the director of Schindler’s List

Sweden, Finland and Austria join the European Union

Tanzania’s first democratic elections lead to victory for Benjamin Mkapa of the former single-party coalition.

Toy Story by Pixar (Walt Disney) is the first film entirely made on the computer: it was born from the entrepreneurial ability of Steve Jobs and the directorial talent of John Lasseter; it will be a revolution in the world of cartoons comparable to that

Quebec Separatists Defeat: With a slim majority of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, Quebec residents chose to remain a province of Canada. French-speaking Quebec has long considered itself culturally separate from the rest of Canada. The referendum posed the most serious threat to Canadian unity

Shih, University of Baltimore, Maryland, performs an experiment that confirms the quanglement effect (quantum information transferred through entanglement)

In the mid-1990s, the assets of the major American investment banks amounted to $2 trillion. By 2007, they’d reach $22 trillion. Hedge funds, meanwhile, rose from $100 billion to $30 trillion. The total value of all derivatives in 2007 would reach $600 trillion, or 10

International tourism: arrivals amount to 550 million people annually. This figure will rise to 1.2 billion people annually in 2015.

Major privatizations in Italy: mobile and landline telephony, electricity, hydrocarbons, highways, airplanes, airports, railways, etc.

Network Access Points (NAP) are permanently replacing the Internet backbone

In the United States, it is now possible to patent software and software algorithms “that produce a useful, concrete, and tangible result.” This move was made possible by President Bill Clinton’s appointment of a Software Publishing Industry lobbyist to head the Patent Office.

Nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. During the morning rush hour, fanatics from the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect converged on the Kasumigaseki station of the Tokyo subway and released a lethal gas, sarin, into the air. After taking an antidote, the terrorists fled, while passengers,

The Banana Equivalent Radiation Dose is coined. Gary Mansfield writes to Radsafe, arguing that it is impossible to achieve zero radiation levels, since even bananas are radioactive, containing small doses of the highly radioactive isotope Potassium-40 (one of the radioactive components that heats the Earth’s

David di Vincenzo of IBM Research shows how to build a Deutsch Gate with combinations of only two-qu-bit gate inputs (and outputs, being reversible)

Steve Fosset completes the first round-the-world balloon flight (using jet streams)

President Clinton signs Executive Order 12951, “Release of Imagery Acquired by Space-based National Intelligence Reconnaissance Systems.” This concerns classified imagery from the CORONA spy satellites.

Netanya, Israel. A Palestinian attack kills 22.

In Fiuggi, from the ashes of the Italian Social Movement, National Alliance was born, with 1507 votes in favour out of 1679.

Earthquake magnitude 7.2 in Osaka and Kobe (6,394 deaths, $99 billion in damage)

Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed plot a large-scale attack in the Philippines, known as Operation Bojinka. The attack was planned with Abdul Hakim Murad, also Pakistani, and the Afghan financier, Wali Khan Amin Shah. It unfolded in three phases: 1) the assassination of the

The complete genome of Haemophilus influenzae is decoded

Los Alamos Nat’l Labs researchers test a ceramic superconductor (YBCO – yttrium, barium, copper, oxygen) that delivers 1 million amps at 77K.

Ward Cunningham, a Purdue graduate from Indiana, created what he calls a “wiki,” a web page that users can edit by clicking directly on the page. “wiki” is the Hawaiian term for “fast.” His web pages are called WikiWikiWeb. The idea is based on the

With the sudden collapse of the USSR in August 1991, even its flagship was at risk of being dismantled: the military-industrial complex with 600,000 workers, engineers, and scientists. The $4 billion budget in 1989 collapsed to $0.7 billion in 1994, and thousands of prestigious technicians

Russia. The Rockot (diamond) launcher is derived from the Soviet SS-19 ICBM (Vladimir Chelomei’s UR-100). In the USSR, there were 360 SS-19 Stilettos ready in silos, and another 144 were launched as tests. The first orbital mission took place on December 26, 1994. It launched

The USAF during the intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina lost on average one aircraft every 17,000 missions, in Vietnam it was one every 1240 missions, during the Second World War it was one every 95

NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the subsequent Dayton Peace Accords, Ohio

War in Chechnya between Russian troops and independence rebels (20,000 dead)

Exodus of 25,000 rafters from Cuba to Florida and Guantanamo Bay

Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Theorem with a 130-page proof that focuses on the proof of the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture (Fermat’s Last Theorem: a^n + b^n differs from c^n for all n > 2). The proof will be published in the May 1995 issue of Annals of

Linus Pauling dies in California at age 93.

The largest (fragment G) of the 21 fragments from Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashes into Jupiter. The dark “crater” in Jupiter’s clouds is the size of Earth. Fragment G causes an explosion of 6 million megatons: 600 times the power of all the nuclear bombs humanity has

Anti-Semitic attack on AMIA (Jewish Mutual Aid Association) in Buenos Aires: 86 dead

The first of 21 fragments from Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashes into Jupiter. They reach speeds of 60 km/s! The impact temperatures are 23,700°C, as measured by the Galileo probe orbiting Jupiter. It’s also the 25th anniversary of the first lunar landing, and Neil Armstrong himself mentions