Luigi Preiti opened fire in front of Palazzo Chigi, where the new Letta government was meeting, wounding two police officers, one seriously in the neck.

Passage of comet PANSTARRS

The CIA captures one of bin Laden’s sons-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, in Jordan, accused of being an active member of al-Qaeda. He is extradited to the United States and will appear in federal court in New York two days later.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a prominent al-Qaeda figure considered the mastermind of the hijacking of the In Amenas oil facility in Algeria, is killed in Mali by Chadian soldiers.

Italy. The general election leaves the country virtually ungovernable under the old system, divided between the Democratic Party-led coalition, the Freedom Party-led coalition, and the Five Star Movement. No one has a majority in both chambers.

Chelyabinsk, Russia. A meteorite weighing approximately 10,000 tons and 15 meters in diameter hurtles through the atmosphere, leaving a bright vapor trail and illuminating everything brighter than the sun for a few seconds before disintegrating. It’s a fireball that entered the atmosphere at the incredible speed of 18 kilometers per second. 1,200 people are injured by shattered windows and collapsed windows. The American sensor network (a legacy of the Cold War) for detecting infrasound from foreign nuclear explosions estimates the blast to be 300,000 tons of TNT: about 20 times that of Hiroshima! The event is captured by countless cameras now standard equipment on every Russian car.

Mali. French and Chadian troops occupy Tessalit, in the north of the country, on the border with Algeria, where the last remaining airport still held by the Islamists is located. The French, supported with troops and logistics by several African (including Nigeria and Chad) and Western (including the US and UK) nations, thus take control of almost all strategic centers in northern Mali, losing one helicopter pilot. Casualties among the Ansar Dine guerrillas are estimated at several hundred during these four weeks.

The world’s first artificial hamburger is produced and eaten. No cows were killed or slaughtered for this: it’s grown from specially engineered cells. The first artificial steak cost $330,000. After four years of research and development, the price dropped to $11. It’s expected that within a decade, it will be cheaper than beef.

United States. Women’s right to vote is a given; there have already been several female Secretaries of State, as have members of the Supreme Court, including three women (and two men) who in 2013 voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. Only a century earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the same country, the very idea of giving women the vote was considered outrageous by most; the possibility of having a woman on the Supreme Court or Secretary of State was simply ridiculous; homosexuality was a topic that could not even be mentioned.

ISRO, India’s space agency, launches the Mangalyaan probe, or MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission), which successfully enters Martian orbit, making India the only country to do so on the first try.

NASA launches the MAVEN probe, which will enter Martian orbit, between 150 and 600 km above the surface, mapping the thin atmosphere and how it is lost to space.

Google is making an initial release, limited to developers, of Google Glasses, a wearable computer that enables augmented reality.

Algeria. Amenas oil extraction facility, on the border with Libya. A group of Islamic extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda kidnaps a thousand workers, including several Westerners, in response to French intervention in northern Mali. The Algerian government decides to intervene on January 20, without coordinating with other countries. The heavy firefight leaves 39 hostages and 29 militants dead. 685 Algerian workers and 107 foreigners are freed. Three terrorists are captured.

End of the First Great Mayan Cycle. In practice, the 13th baktun ends; according to some Mayan writings, it is an “important” period. The baktun is a cycle of 144,000 days (a little more than 394 years). The first baktun began on August 11, 3114 BC. The Mayan calendar is base 20: 7,200 days is a katun, and 20 katuns are a baktun, and 20 baktuns are a piktun. So don’t worry: after the thirteenth baktun, the world doesn’t end. The Maya believed that the world continued, even after the first piktun. For example, a 7th-century BC writing by King Pacal of Palenque predicts an important commemoration of the anniversary of his accession to the throne for October 15, 4772.

There are more practicing Christians in China than in Europe itself. There are approximately 130 million Christians, mostly Protestants. More churches are built and more Bibles are printed each year in China than in any other country in the world.

Barack Obama is re-elected President of the United States of America. He defeats Mormon Mitt Romney after a heated campaign. The favorable vote in several swing states, particularly Ohio, proves crucial.

Space X CRS-1 Cargo Mission: The privately owned two-stage Falcon 9 launcher docks with the International Space Station (ISS) for the second time. One of the nine first-stage engines shuts down almost immediately after launch, but the other eight are automatically managed to burn longer to compensate, and the rendezvous is a complete success.

The Stuttgart prosecutor’s office has closed the case of the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre, carried out during World War II by the Waffen SS. This despite the testimony of Ludwig Göring, who voluntarily admitted to emptying an entire cartridge belt into a group of 25 women gathered in a circle in the farmyard. They then piled up the bodies and doused them with gasoline, setting them alight. In Italy, however, 10 convictions were handed down, which were upheld on appeal and in cassation.

A convolutional neural network (CNN) called AlexNet wins the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge.

Southern Somalia: Kenyan marines, in an amphibious operation, capture the city of Kismayo and drive out the al-Qaeda-linked Shebab, Islamic extremists. Kismayo and its port were the main source of income for the Somali Islamists.

Somalia. The new Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohammud, recently elected by parliament, and the Kenyan foreign minister escaped unscathed from an attack involving two explosions, killing only the suicide bomber.

Neil Armstrong dies.

London Olympics

Melbourne, Australia. International Conference on High Energy Physics. Representatives of two LHC experiments, American Joseph Incandela for CMS and Italian Fabiola Giannotti for ATLAS, introduce themselves to the audience and begin with “WE HAVE A DISCOVERY.” This is the official announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson (the “God particle” as Leon Lederman called it), with a 5-sigma (99.99994%) confidence level, which confers the property of mass to all other particles. At the LHC in Geneva, the discovery (with 5-sigma confidence level) of the Higgs boson is experimentally confirmed, with an estimated mass of around 125.3 GeV (measured by the CMS detector) – 126.0 GeV (measured by the ATLAS detector).

Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, wins Egypt’s elections and becomes the country’s new president with 52% of the vote. An engineer trained in the United States, Mohammed Morsi has been a member of Parliament since 2005 as a formally independent MP and became the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate after leader Khairat Saad El-Shater was barred from running by the electoral commission.

China’s Tiangong-1 space station hosts its first human crew.

Global Financial Crisis. The European Central Bank is lending Spain €100 billion on very favorable terms due to the dire straits of Spanish banks.

Pakistan. Abu Yahia al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s number two, is killed in a drone strike in a tribal area of Pakistan. Al-Libi had taken over as al-Qaeda’s number two when Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri became leader after the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Emilia. 9:03 p.m. Another earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale shakes the Modena lowlands again.

Finale Emilia, Bassa Modenese. Half of the Clock Tower collapses. The photo of the clock broken in half becomes the symbol of the earthquake. The tower collapses a few hours later, in the afternoon.

Myanmar (formerly Burma or Burma). Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, return to parliament after twenty years of struggle and 15 years in prison and house arrest. International isolation is easing, and foreign investment is returning.

James Cameron, the 57-year-old director of Titanic, Avatar, and The Abyss, is the first man to reach the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, 10,898 meters below sea level, aboard a special submarine. With the Deepsea Challenge mission, organized with the support of National Geographic, the director spent approximately three hours on the Pacific ocean floor, collecting surface samples for scientific research and taking photographs. Before him, only Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh had explored the Mariana Trench, on January 23, 1960, aboard the Italian-built bathyscaphe Trieste, but without reaching the depth reached by the Canadian director. The seabed had previously been reached only by two robotic submarines: the Japanese Kaiko in 1995 and the American Nereus in 2009.

Toulouse, France. After a 32-hour siege, the Toulouse serial killer is killed. He is Mohammed Merah, 23, of Algerian origin, who claims to have links to Al Qaeda. In the past two weeks, he had killed three special forces soldiers in Toulouse and Montauban, and carried out a massacre at a Jewish school: a teacher and two children. He filmed all the crimes, and the hours of the siege.

Shenouda III, the Pope of the Copts, dies at 88. Elected primate in 1971, he was the 117th successor to the evangelist St. Mark, who founded the Coptic Church in Egypt.

Kandahar, Afghanistan. 3:00 a.m. An American sergeant leaves his base, enters three homes in two villages, Alkozai and Balandi, in the Panjwai district, and begins shooting. In the first home, located about 450 meters from the US base, he kills 11 people, including women and small children. In two other homes, he leaves seven more bodies lying on the ground.

For the first time, physicists have measured the minuscule amount of heat released when a single bit of data is erased. Although the value was first predicted more than 50 years ago, it is so small that measuring it has proven impossible—until now. The experiment, which involved trapping a tiny bead in a double well created by a laser and tracking its motion as it rotated between the wells, places a lower limit on the energy dissipated by logic circuits, which could influence the design of future electronic devices. For decades, physicists and computer scientists have established connections between thermodynamics and information theory. In 1961, German-American physicist Rolf Landauer deduced that the irreversible erasure of information involves heat dissipation. The “Landauer principle” applies to computational processes in which the number of bits of information decreases as the computation progresses, which occurs in all conventional computers. A prominent example of irreversible erasure is the “reset-to-one” process, whereby a piece of information containing a bit, which can be either 0 or 1, is reset to 1. Since the information held by the bit is destroyed, this data can no longer be recovered because, once the bit is set to 1, we have no way of knowing its previous value. What has essentially happened is that the entropy—or randomness—of the bit has been reduced. And since the bit and its surroundings are physical entities that must obey the laws of thermodynamics, this entropy must be transferred from the bit to its surroundings in the form of heat. Indeed, according to Landauer’s theory, a minimal amount of heat—about 10-21 J per erased bit—must be dissipated when the information is destroyed. Unfortunately, physicists have struggled to verify this prediction because 10-21 J per erased bit is less than one-thousandth of the electrical energy dissipated when a modern silicon device is reset. Eric Lutz of the University of Augsburg, along with Sergio Ciliberto and colleagues from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Raoul Dillenschneider of the University of Kaiserslautern, are the first to experimentally confirm Landauer’s principle. Instead of using a silicon circuit, the team’s data bit comprises a tiny silica bead just 2 µm in diameter that is immersed in water and trapped using optical tweezers. The laser used to create the tweezers is alternately focused on two different points in rapid succession, creating two different points where the bead can be trapped. The

Cambodia. The sentence for Duch, a Khmer Rouge leader who led the S-21 camp where 14,000 prisoners died, has been commuted to life imprisonment.

Homs, Syria. Government repression continues in the country. A mortar attack on civilian homes by the army has killed 337 people.

Kano, Nigeria. The radical Islamic sect Boko Haram continues to perpetrate massacres across the country. On January 21, a single attack killed at least 250 people.

Giglio Island. The Costa Concordia cruise ship sank after hitting a rock and ran aground near the shore. Of the four thousand passengers, 17 died, and 15 were missing.

Global Financial Crisis. Standard & Poor’s cuts the ratings of several countries, including Italy and France, which loses its AAA rating.

Iraq. The last American soldiers and equipment are leaving the country. Only 157 soldiers remain for the embassy in Baghdad. The war lasted nine years, sparking a civil war that killed 100,000 Iraqis. Of the 1.5 million Americans who passed through Iraqi territory, 4,487 were killed. The cost is estimated at $1 trillion. The Americans are leaving behind a fragile democracy with strong ethnic tensions (e.g., between Kurds, Turks, and Arabs) and religious tensions (e.g., between Sunnis and Shiites).

Naples. Michele Zagaria, the fugitive boss of the Casalesi clan, wanted for 16 years, is captured in Casapesenna, near Caserta. He was hiding in a bunker under 5 meters of reinforced concrete. The raid began around 3:00 a.m., and once the fugitive’s presence was confirmed in the house, law enforcement began an hour-long negotiation, which culminated in his surrender. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot…” were the superboss’ first words, “…you won, the state won,” he quipped. The house is that of Vincenzo Inquieto, known as “Enzo the plumber.”

Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA launches the Curiosity probe aboard its Atlas V rocket toward Mars.

Southern Somalia: Ethiopian and Kenyan troops, in close coordination, invade Somalia to fight the Shabab, or Islamic extremists linked to Al Qaeda. The UN-backed operation also includes support from the so-called Sufis (Ahlu-Sunnah wal-Jamah), Ugandans, Burundians, but also French, American Predator aircraft, and possibly Italian helicopters.

Southern Libya. Saif al-Islam, Muammar Gaddafi’s second son, is captured by Libyan border forces. He was attempting to cross the border.

Rome: President Napolitano entrusts Mario Monti with the government mandate.

Rome: Silvio Berlusconi resigns after the vote on the Stability Law. This brings to a close a period that at times spans two decades. Napolitano’s role was crucial, having appointed Mario Monti a senator for life two days earlier, thus making him a candidate for Prime Minister.