Aretha Franklin, “the Queen of Soul”, dies.

During torrential rain, a 210-meter section (one of the arches) of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed, taking down 35 cars and three trucks. The cause is thought to be corrosion of the steel cables within the compressed concrete of the stays supporting the arches.

A total lunar eclipse, lasting a record-breaking 1 hour and 43 minutes (for the 21st century), with Mars simultaneously visible, positioned very close to the Moon in opposition (at its maximum diameter in the sky) with its atmosphere almost completely obscured by a sandstorm, and Jupiter and Saturn also clearly visible at the same time (and Venus in the early evening).

team led by Roberto Orosei of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) discovered a 20-kilometer-long lake of liquid saltwater beneath the Martian south polar cap. A few years later, in 2021, independent laboratory tests raised doubts about the possibility of liquid water under those conditions and attributed the reflections to a layer of clay.

Sergio Marchionne, CEO of FCA, Ferrari, and CNH, has died. With the merger of Fiat and Chrysler, he is credited with saving both companies.

Helsinki. A summit meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin took place in Helsinki, with private talks lasting more than two hours.

Washington DC, USA. “My great friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping…” thus begins Donald Trump’s speech, in which he imposes heavy trade tariffs on China: 25% import duties, totaling $50 billion. And these are just the first of a series of tariff packages that will follow.

Global Foundries (also financed with capital from the Persian Gulf) cancels its program to develop EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) technology, which enables the fabrication of chips using 7nm technology. At this point, only TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (South Korea), and Intel (USA) remain on the global stage. Building cutting-edge silicon foundries has become too expensive for all but a very few. Even the “deep pockets” of the Persian Gulf royal families aren’t deep enough.

ATT buys Time Warner for 85 BLN USD

Disney acquires 20th Century Fox for $71 billion.

Global airlines are increasing the percentage of seats used on their aircraft, from an average of 56% in 1971 to 81% in 2018.

From 1800 to 2018, carbon dioxide (CO2) increased from 283 ppmv (parts per million by volume) to 408 ppmv. Almost all of this contribution is due to human activities: 2% is emitted by industry, 6% by buildings, 14% by transportation, 24% by agriculture, and 25% by electricity and heat production.

Venezuela. The socialism of the Chávez-Maduro era has brought catastrophic economic ruin, accompanied by human suffering, despite its enormous oil wealth (Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world). GDP collapsed by 35% from 2013 to 2017. This is the worst economic collapse ever seen in the Americas or Western Europe. Inflation reached 18,000% in early 2018, and then 1,290,000% by the end of the same year. Emigration to Colombia has reached 5,000 people per day over the same period. Infant mortality has surpassed that of civil war-torn Syria.

The giant Chinese telecommunications company ZTE (Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment) is the reason for Chinese Premier Xi’s request to US President Trump to lift the US embargo on ZTE, ordered by the Obama administration following ZTE’s trade relations with North Korea on embargoed products. This order to establish trade relations with American companies has put ZTE in crisis and led to Xi’s request. Trump grants the request and temporarily suspends the embargo. The incident is a wake-up call for Beijing: Xi doesn’t want to find himself begging in front of the US president again. Huawei will take advantage of the lesson learned by seeking to become fully independent in its supply chain.

Singapore. North Korean President Kim Jong Un and American President Donald Trump met. It was the first time since the 1950 Korean War.

South Korea. Kim Jong-un crosses the border (the first time a North Korean head of state has done so since 1953) and has an official meeting with South Korean Prime Minister Moon Jae-in.

The American exoplanet-hunting space telescope, TESS, is launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket is recovered. As of April 5, 2021 (the end of the primary mission), TESS had identified 2,601 candidate exoplanets, and the extended mission continues to acquire additional data. These data add to the thousands already discovered by Kepler and other means.

It turns out that the galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 has no dark matter. It is an ultradiffuse galaxy, with very low mass. It is therefore the first galaxy observed whose orbital velocity is consistent with the gravitational force expected from its observable stars. The presence of even this galaxy alone means that dark matter cannot be explained by a modification of Newton’s universal gravitation. Subsequent measurements in 2019 on DF2, however, indicate that it could contain a normal amount of dark matter. The question remains open, although a second galaxy, NGC 1052-DF4, appears to be devoid of dark matter.

Carcassonne, France. Radouane Lakdim, a 25-year-old Moroccan man who claims to be a member of ISIS and wants to free Salah Abdeslam (Paris attack of November 2015), kills two people and takes hostages in a supermarket. One of the police officers offers to exchange one of the hostages and leaves his phone on for his colleagues. When they hear the gunshots, special forces intervene. The police officer, 44-year-old Arnaud Beltrame, is fatally wounded.

Salisbury, England. Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, as they do every year, visit his wife’s grave to lay a bouquet of flowers. Yulia lives in Russia, and her father lives in England. Someone slips the nerve agent, already in Russia, into Yulia’s suitcase, and arranges for her to unknowingly bring it to England. Both are hospitalized in critical condition but survive. The traces left by the nerve agent are innumerable. The incident sparks a fierce diplomatic clash between the UK and Russia, with dozens of government officials expelled from both sides, and countries such as Germany and the United States declaring their support for Britain.

Elon Musk’s Space X launches the Falcon Heavy, carrying a Tesla Roadster sports car and a mannequin in a Space X spacesuit, into orbit beyond Mars, toward the dwarf planet Ceres. The images from space, featuring the Roadster and Earth in the background, set to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” are breathtaking.

Idlib, Syria. A Russian Su-25 warplane is shot down by rebels. The pilot ejects, but then commits suicide with a grenade before being captured.

Kabul, Afghanistan. A Taliban suicide attack, involving an ambulance gaining access to the capital’s protected area, kills around a hundred people and wounds hundreds more.

Syria. The territories under direct ISIS control are reduced to a bare minimum. But now, with the ISIS challenge defeated, the Damascus government and Turkey are focusing on other objectives. Damascus is attacking the rebel enclave of Idlib, while Turkey is bombing and attacking the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, in open defiance of American interests (allies of the Kurdish YPG), the Russians (who have a battalion in Afrin), and Syrian interests (who are suffering from a Turkish invasion of their territory and are threatening to shoot down Turkish warplanes).

John Young, astronaut on Apollo 10, Apollo 16 (walks on the moon with Charlie Duke), Gemini 3 and 10, and STS-1 (first to pilot the Space Shuttle) and STS-9, dies.

China, for the first time, launches more rockets (not more satellites…) than any other nation.

Kaonan Micadei of the Federal University of ABC in Brazil, constructs a microsystem, at the atomic level, where the arrow of time, understood as linked to entropy, is reversed, meaning heat flows from a cold body to a hot one.

Iraq declares victory in the war against ISIS on its soil. A few pockets, mostly desert, remain in eastern Syria, but ISIS has lost more than 95% of its territory. Of the 40,000 fighters who fought in 2014, only about 3,000 remain. Nearly 7,000 foreign militants have been killed and approximately 5,000 imprisoned, but several thousand fighters have vanished. Air strikes by the American coalition alone have totaled more than 30,000, to which must be added Russian and Syrian air strikes.

milestone in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google’s AlphaZero program defeats Stockfish 8, the world chess champion since 2016, at chess. Stockfish 8 had access to the brute force of centuries of human experience accumulated in its memory. It was capable of calculating 70 billion positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero can only calculate 80,000 positions per second, and no one has ever taught it any chess strategy whatsoever. It learned using the principles of AI machine learning, playing against itself. It took only 4 hours to learn. It played 100 games with Stockfish 8 and won 28 times, drawing 78 times. It didn’t lose a single game. Many of its moves are completely unconventional and can be considered creative.

Pisa. Adalberto Giazotto, an Italian physicist, dies. He had the intuition that gravitational wave detectors could be built on Earth using enormous interferometers with stationary pendulums to minimize coupling of the mirrors with the ground. These interferometers searched for signals in the 10-100Hz range, previously unexplored and the most interesting of all. These were the low notes of a pipe organ (Adalberto was the son of a well-known musician). Adalberto carried out his experiments with stationary pendulums practically alone for several years. His idea would form the basis of the American LIGO detectors, which would first make the discovery, as well as the Italian Virgo detector in Pisa, which would confirm the discovery of gravitational waves and detect many others. Adalberto died shortly after the discovery.

Chile. The planet Ross 128b is discovered 11 light-years from Earth using the La Silla telescope. It is the second terrestrial planet in terms of distance, after Proxima b.

iPTF14hls, a bizarre supernova (or zombie star), continues to explode repeatedly. The first known one occurred in 1954, and several more recently within 11 weeks. One possible explanation (Pulsational Pair-Instability Supernovae), hypothesized by Daniel Kasen and discovered by Arcavi, Howell, and Birnstein, posits a star of enormous size (common shortly after the Big Bang, but rare now), so large and heavy that it creates antimatter (positrons) in its core, which would then trigger violent, periodic explosions.

The first in vivo gene editing procedure, performed not in a laboratory cell culture but directly on a patient with Hunter syndrome, has been performed in the United States. The therapy, tested by California-based Sangamo Therapeutics, uses a viral vector that, when injected into the body, uses the CRISPR editing technique to cut the genome at the portion containing the malfunctioning gene and replace it with the correct sequence. Concerns in this case are about possible side effects if the molecular scissors accidentally cut and pasted other areas of the genome, but so far no problems have been reported in the patient.

Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser reentry spacecraft completes its first flight without any problems (the previous flight had suffered a landing gear issue). It is released from a Chinook helicopter from an altitude of more than 12 kilometers.

New York City. Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant to the United States, drives his van into a car park on a bike path in Lower Manhattan. He kills eight people and wounds 11. He claims to be working for ISIS. He shouted “Allah Akhbar.” Among the eight victims, five are Argentinian former classmates traveling to New York to celebrate their 30th graduation.

Afghanistan. A series of attacks have killed over 70 Muslim worshippers at prayer. The first occurred in a Shiite mosque in Kabul and was claimed by ISIS; the second in a Sunni mosque in Ghor, a central province of Afghanistan.

The Pan-Starrs 1 telescope in Hawaii has discovered an asteroid from outside the solar system. It’s the first of its kind. It was first named 1I/2017U1 and then christened Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word meaning “the messenger who comes from far away and arrives first.” It measures 400 x 40 meters and is very flat. It’s reddish in color and composed almost entirely of rock and metal (no ice).

North Korea. Underground explosion of a thermonuclear device of approximately 50,000 tons. This is North Korea’s sixth nuclear test.