Frank Blackmore, British traffic engineer and inventor of the city roundabouts that revolutionized English traffic starting in the 1960s, dies.

The American Mars Phoenix probe successfully lands on the frozen surface of the Martian North Pole (Vastitas Borealis).

A 16-year-old diabetic girl dies in Italy because her daily insulin doses were replaced with herbal and homeopathic products.

An earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck Sichuan province in central China, leaving over 60,000 dead and millions homeless.

The Nargis monsoon hits Myanmar (Burma) causing perhaps over 100,000 deaths, the regime initially denies the tragedy and then hinders the arrival of relief, finally trying to take credit for the little relief that has reached the population

Silvio Berlusconi’s “Freedom Party” wins a strong majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate; the far right and far left fail to obtain enough votes to be represented in Parliament for the first time since the war.

Maoists win elections in Nepal

John Archibald Wheeler, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, died of pneumonia at the age of 96. He coined the term “black holes,” worked with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and mentored talents such as Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett. In the 1990s, he advanced the hypothesis that information is more fundamental than matter, a concept summarized in his statement “it from bits,” the idea that everything (it) is made only of information (bits). Some of his maxims: “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance.” “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” “The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.”

The Cassini spacecraft recorded the presence of organic compounds in the plumes of Enceladus geysers. This is a tantalizing indication that life may exist in the oceans beneath the ice of Saturn’s moon. Enceladus, like Europa, is still a target for potential missions searching for signs of life.

Shlemon Rahho, bishop of Mosul, was found dead in Iraq; he had been kidnapped on February 29.

Raul Reyes, a prominent figure in the FARC guerrilla group, along with other members of the group, including the group’s ideologue, Guillermo Enrique Torres, were killed in an airstrike by the Colombian Air Force. The incident occurred at a time of tension between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

STS122 Atlantis Mission: Assembly of the European Columbus Module

The American satellite USA193 is shot down during reentry by a US Navy missile; the satellite, travelling at Mach 21, is hit in the hydrazine tank by impact

Moscow, Russia. Four days after Kosovo officially declared independence from Serbia, Putin called Georgian President Saakashvili to Moscow and told him: “We have to answer to the West about the Kosovo issue, you know. We’re very sorry, but you are part of the answer. It’s not Georgia’s fault, but your geography is what it is.” Soon after, Russia would occupy Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regions of Georgia with a large Russian-speaking community, and establish strong economic, political, and legal ties with these regions.

Fidel Castro, after almost half a century, announces his resignation, passing the position to his brother Raul Castro

Kosovo officially declares independence from Serbia. It is recognized by Western nations, led by the United States and the European Union. In Russia, Putin does not accept this decision passively and considers countermeasures: four days later, he calls Georgian President Saakashvili to Moscow and tells him: “We must answer to the West about the Kosovo issue, you know. We are very sorry, but you are part of the answer. It’s not Georgia’s fault, but your geography is what it is.” Soon after, Russia will occupy Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regions of Georgia with a large Russian-speaking community, and will establish strong economic, political, and legal ties with these regions.

Pakistani elections: Benazir Bhutto’s party wins after she was assassinated a few weeks earlier.

The American probe Messenger transits Mercury and takes the first photos of the so-called terra incognita of the planet, that is, the part not photographed by the Mariner 10 probe on March 24, 1975.

Benazir Bhutto, the main opposition candidate in the elections scheduled for the following January 8th, is also assassinated in a suicide attack that kills more than 35 people; Bhutto was the daughter of a former Pakistani prime minister, killed after a coup, and she herself was a former prime minister of Pakistan.

During 2007, 100,000 Iraqis joined the Iraqi Security Forces, the army formed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Auger Observatory scientists demonstrate that extremely high-energy cosmic rays originate from supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies.

England. Global Financial Crisis. The fifth largest bank in England, Northern Rock, is besieged by savers demanding to withdraw their money from their current accounts. With confidence at rock bottom, and various bankers viewing each other with suspicion, the credit machine jams, heading for the crisis of 2008.

The cover story of Forbes magazine is all about the Finnish cell phone manufacturer Nokia, and asks: “Can anyone catch the cell phone king?” Apple had already released the iPhone, the first smartphone, in June 2007. But evidently, many people, even at the top, hadn’t yet realized the revolution. Apple would sell more than a billion of them in a decade. Microsoft would buy Nokia for $7 billion in 2013, and resell it in 2016 to a Taiwanese company for just $0.35 billion. Apple would eventually reach a value of $1.3 trillion.

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work

Michael Brown, David Lincoln Rabinowitz, and Schwamb discover the dwarf planet G!Kun||’homdima, and its moon G!o’e!Hu’ (no, a cat didn’t run over the keyboard – cit. Adrian Fartade – they are names taken from the mythology of a Namibian population), in the Kuiper Belt, with an estimated diameter of 614 km.

Benazir Bhutto, just after returning to Pakistan, was the victim of an attack in which more than 130 people died; she escaped unscathed.

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate in Burma in defiance of the regime. The demonstrations are inspired and led by Buddhist monks who enjoy the respect of the military. The protests continue in the following days, and the regime’s repression is not long in coming.

British SAS special forces and Italian Col Moschin free two Italian Military Intelligence (SISMI) agents kidnapped in the Farah area of Afghanistan a few days earlier; nine of the ten kidnappers are killed; the operation was made possible thanks to GPS and the use of a Predator drone.

Anti-Syrian Christian MP Antoin Ghanem was killed in a car bombing along with six others in Beirut.

With the help of the radio telescopes of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, Lawrence Rudnick, of the University of Minnesota, discovers a huge empty structure (i.e. poor in both ordinary and dark matter) located between 6 and 10 billion light years away from us.

Third, and final, flyby of a solar pole by the Ulysses probe. Launched in 1990, it is powered by plutonium radioisotopes, the same series produced in the 1960s by the Americans and used on the Apollo, Voyager, Pioneer, and even the Curiosity Mars rover missions.

The American Mars Phoenix probe lifts off from Cape Canaveral bound for Mars

Michael Brown, David Lincoln Rabinowitz, and Schwamb discover the dwarf planet Gonggong, in the Kuiper Belt, with an estimated diameter of 1,535 km (more than half the diameter of Pluto).

Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta in Edmonton demonstrates that the game of chess, if played perfectly (i.e. without making mistakes – see Zermelo’s Theorem -), is a no-win situation, i.e. it always ends in a draw.

Chemical Ali’ or Chemical Ali’, responsible for the massacres of Kurdish civilians with toxic gases such as nerve agents, and cousin of Saddam Hussein, is sentenced to death by hanging

Daimler-Benz sells Chrysler to an American investment fund, collecting 7 billion USD, having spent 37 billion nine years earlier to buy it

Afghanistan: Mullah Dadullah, the most feared Taliban leader and organizer of the kidnapping of Italian journalist Mastrogiacomo, and his brother are killed during a joint NATO-Afghan operation in the south of the country.

Center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy wins French presidential election against Socialist Ségolène Royal

Four al-Qaeda terrorists were killed in Morocco; three detonated explosive belts they were wearing, and the fourth was shot by police; they were wanted for an attack on an internet café.

Iran seizes 15 British marines patrolling Iraqi waters; Iranians claim they were in Iranian waters; released weeks later

The American Institute of Mathematics, with the help of the Sage supercomputer at Washington University, has managed to complete, after 4 years of work, the mapping of the E8 to explain its symmetry. It is a 248-dimensional object belonging to a Lie group (the “E8” precisely) that can rotate around its own axis always appearing in the same way, as well as the dodecahedron (12 faces) and the icosahedron (20 faces) which also belong to the Lie group E8, the tetrahedron (4 faces), the cube (6 faces) and the octahedron (8 faces) belonging to the Lie groups E6 and E7, and finally, the sphere; the study can have important applications in the heterotic theory of 26-dimensional strings (reduced to 3 spatial and one temporal by rolling up 16 of them with a double use of E8 and then 6 in another way).

Iran. Fifteen British Navy sailors were held hostage by Iranian authorities for two weeks.