1994 in science

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The year 1994 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Archaeology

• March 31 – The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull, significant in the study of human evolution.
• December 18 – Chauvet Cave discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet and other speleologists near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche department of southern France, containing some of the earliest known cave paintings of animals, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life.^[1][2]

Astronomy and space exploration

• July 16–July 22 – The fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact the planet Jupiter
• July 21 – R. Ibata, M. Irwin, and G. Gilmore discover the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, considered the closest galaxy to the Milky Way until 2003.^[3]
• October 12 – NASA loses contact with the Magellan spacecraft after a successful mission. The probe crashes into Venus shortly after.
• Asteroid 7484 Dogo Onsesn is discovered by Masahiro Koishikawa.
• 14032 Mego is discovered.
• 8C 1435+63 is discovered and at z=4.25 becomes the most distant known galaxy.^[4][5]

Biology and medicine

• September 10 – Wollemia (the 'Wollemi Pine'), previously known only from fossils, is discovered living in remote rainforest gorges in the Wollemi National Park of New South Wales by David Noble.^[6]
• October – First public demonstration of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.^[7]
• December 15 – Publication of the "Fukuda" clinical description of chronic fatigue syndrome.^[8]
• The Dingiso or tree-kangaroo of Western New Guinea is first seen by scientists.^[9]
• Gilbert's potoroo is rediscovered in Australia having been thought extinct.
• Flora of China begins publication.
• The first gene linked to Alzheimer's disease is discovered. No new genes would be found until 2009.^[10]
• The Western Hemisphere is declared free of polio.

Chemistry

• November 9 – Darmstadtium first detected at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, under the direction of Prof. Sigurd Hofmann.^[11]
• December 8 – The first three atoms of Roentgenium are observed by an international team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI in Darmstadt.^[12]

Computer science

• January – Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", a hierarchically-organised website, while studying at Stanford University; in April it is renamed Yahoo!^[13]
• December 3 – Sony release the PlayStation fifth generation home video game console in Japan.^[14]
• Netscape Communications creates HTTP Secure for its Netscape Navigator web browser.^[15]
• Leonard Adleman describes the experimental use of DNA as a computational system to solve a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian path problem, the first known instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm.^[16]
• Penguin Books offer Peter James' novel Host on two floppy disks as "the world's first electronic novel".^[17]

Earth sciences

• December 21 – Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano, dormant for 47 years, resumes eruption.

Mathematics

• September 19 – Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem: Andrew Wiles devizes a new approach to the final proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, sending his proof to colleagues on October 6 and submitting for publication on October 24.

Molecular biology

• Green fluorescent protein is successfully expressed in C. elegans, starting its career as a fluorescent marker.

Technology

• May 6 – The Channel Tunnel, which took 15,000 workers over seven years to complete, opens between England and France. It is now possible to travel between the two countries in 35 minutes.
• August 16 – The world's first smartphone, the IBM Simon, goes on sale.^[18]
• December 3 – The first PlayStation gaming console is released in Japan.
• The first high-brightness blue LED is achieved, an invention that earned the researchers a Nobel Prize in 2014.^[19]

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Efim Isakovich Zelmanov, Pierre-Louis Lions, Jean Bourgain and Jean-Christophe Yoccoz
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Bertram N. Brockhouse, Clifford G. Shull
  • Chemistry – George A. Olah
  • Medicine – Alfred G. Gilman, Martin Rodbell
• Turing Award – Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy
• Wollaston Medal for Geology – William Jason Morgan

Deaths

• January 25 – Stephen Cole Kleene (b. 1909), American mathematician.
• April 17 – Roger Wolcott Sperry (b. 1913), American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• July 29 – Dorothy Hodgkin (b. 1910), British biochemist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• August 19 – Linus Pauling (b. 1901), American chemist.
• August 29 – Arthur Mourant (b. 1904), Jersiais hematologist.
• October 28 – Calvin Souther Fuller, American physical chemist at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

References

1. Chauvet, Jean-Marie; Deschamps, Eliette Brunel; Hillaire, Christian (1996). Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-3232-6.
2. Clottes, Jean (2003). Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times. Paul G. Bahn (translator). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. p. 214. ISBN 0-87480-758-1.
3. Ibata, R. A.; Gilmore, G.; Irwin, M. J. (1994). "A dwarf satellite galaxy in Sagittarius". Nature. 370 (6486): 194–196. Bibcode:1994Natur.370..194I. doi:10.1038/370194a0.
4. Lacy, M.; Miley, G.; Rawlings, S.; Saunders, R.; Dickinson, M.; Garrington, S.; Maddox, S.; Pooley, G.; Steidel, C. C.; Bremer, M.N.; Cotter, G.; van Ojik, R.; Röttgering, H.; Warner, P. (1994). "8C 1435+635: A radio galaxy at z = 4.25". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 271: 504–512. Bibcode:1994MNRAS.271..504L. doi:10.1093/mnras/271.2.504.
5. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/9411/9411007v1.pdf
6. Woodford, James (2002). The Wollemi Pine: the incredible discovery of a living fossil from the age of the dinosaurs (rev. ed.). Text Publishing Co. ISBN 1-876485-74-4.
7. "About the Cochrane Library". The Cochrane Library. Archived from the original on 5 January 2011. Retrieved 2011-01-25.
8. Fukuda, Keiji; Straus, Stephen E.; Hickie, Ian; Sharpe, Michael C.; Dobbins, James G.; Komaroff, Anthony; International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study Group (15 December 1994). "The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Comprehensive Approach to Its Definition and Study". Annals of Internal Medicine. 121 (12): 953–9. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-121-12-199412150-00009. PMID 7978722. Retrieved 2011-07-29.
9. Flannery, T. F.; Boeadi; Szalay, A. L. (1995). "A new tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus: Marsupialia) from Irian Jaya, Indonesia, with notes on ethnography and the evolution of tree-kangaroos". Mammalia. 59 (1): 65–84. doi:10.1515/mamm.1995.59.1.65.
10. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12937131
11. Hofmann, S.; Ninov, V.; Heßberger, F. P.; Armbruster, P.; Folger, H.; Münzenberg, G.; Schött, H. J.; Popeko, A. G.; Yeremin, A. V.; Andreyev, A. N.; Saro, S.; Janik, R.; Leino, M. (1995). "Production and decay of ²⁶⁹110". Zeitschrift für Physik A. 350 (4): 277–280. Bibcode:1995ZPhyA.350..277H. doi:10.1007/BF01291181.
12. Hofmann, S.; Ninov, V.; Heßberger, F. P.; Armbruster, P.; Folger, H.; Münzenberg, G.; Schött, H. J.; Popeko, A. G.; Yeremin, A. V.; Andreyev, A. N.; Saro, S.; Janik, R.; Leino, M. (1995). "The new element 111" (PDF). Zeitschrift für Physik A. 350 (4): 281–282. Bibcode:1995ZPhyA.350..281H. doi:10.1007/BF01291182.
13. Agence France Presse (2012-01-18). "Who is Jerry Yang?". NDTV. NDTV Convergence Limited. Retrieved 2013-05-27.
14. "Business Development/Japan (1994~2004)". Sony. Retrieved 2012-02-22.
15. Walls, Colin (2005). Embedded software. p. 344. Retrieved 28 January 2012.
16. Adleman, Leonard M. (1994-11-11). "Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems". Science. 266 (5187): 1021–4. Bibcode:1994Sci...266.1021A. doi:10.1126/science.7973651. JSTOR 2885489. PMID 7973651.
17. "All Eight Roy Grace Novels by Peter James Now Available in e-Book Format in the United States: Author of "the world's first electronic novel" in 1994". prweb. 2013-01-31. Retrieved 2015-10-31.
18. "World's first 'smartphone' celebrates 20 years". BBC. 15 August 2014. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
19. Overbye, Dennis (7 October 2014). "Nobel Prize in Physics". New York Times. Retrieved 7 October 2014.