1994 in science

Overview of the events of 1994 in science

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

Archaeology and paleontology

• 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]
• The Australopithecus skeleton "Little Foot" is identified in South Africa.

Astronomy and space exploration

• July 16–22 – 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 linked genes would be found until 2009.^[10]
• The BRCA1 gene is cloned by scientists at University of Utah, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Myriad Genetics.^[11][12]
• 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.^[13]
• December 8 – The first three atoms of Roentgenium are observed by an international team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI in Darmstadt.^[14]

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!^[15]
• April 12 – Husband-and-wife law partners Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel post the first massive commercial spam on Usenet in the United States.
• July 5 - Jeff Bezos launches Amazon
• December 3 – Sony release the PlayStation fifth generation home video game console in Japan.^[16]
• December 15 – Netscape launch the Netscape Navigator web browser, for which it creates HTTP Secure.^[17]
• 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.^[18]
• Penguin Books offer Peter James' novel Host on two floppy disks as "the world's first electronic novel".^[19]

Earth sciences

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

Mathematics

• September 19 – Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem: English mathematician Andrew Wiles devises 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.
• The tennis ball theorem is first published under this name by Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold.^[20][21]

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.^[22]
• December 3 – The first PlayStation gaming console is released in Japan.
• The first high-brightness blue LED is achieved, an invention that earns the researchers a Nobel Prize in 2014.^[23]
• QR code invented by Japanese company Denso.

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.
• May 12 – Erik Erikson (b. 1902), German American psychologist.
• 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 (b. 1902), 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 978-0-8109-3232-6.
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 978-0-87480-758-5.
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 (2): 504–512. Bibcode:1994MNRAS.271..504L. doi:10.1093/mnras/271.2.504.
5. Spinrad, Hyron; Dey, Arjun; Graham, James R (1994). "Keck Observations of the Most Distant Galaxy: 8C1435+63 at z=4.25". The Astrophysical Journal. 438: L51. arXiv:astro-ph/9411007. Bibcode:1995ApJ...438L..51S. doi:10.1086/187713.
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 978-1-876485-74-0.
7. "About the Cochrane Library". The Cochrane Library. Archived from the original on 2011-01-05. 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.
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. Gallagher, James (2011-04-04). "Five more Alzheimer's genes discovered, scientists say". BBC News. Retrieved 2018-01-12.
11. US patent 5747282, Skolnick, H. S.; Goldgar, D. E.; Miki, Y.; Swenson, J.; Kamb, A.; Harshman, K. D.; Shattuck-Eidens, D. M.; Tavtigian, S. V.; Wiseman, R. W.; Futreal, P. A., "7Q-linked breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene", issued 1998-05-05, assigned to Myriad Genetics, Inc., The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and University of Utah Research Foundation. 
12. Miki, Y.; Swensen, J.; Shattuck-Eidens, D.; Futreal, P. A.; Harshman, K.; Tavtigian, S.; Liu, Q.; Cochran, C.; Bennett, L. M.; Ding, W. (October 1994). "A strong candidate for the breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1". Science. 266 (5182): 66–71. Bibcode:1994Sci...266...66M. doi:10.1126/science.7545954. PMID 7545954.
13. 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.
14. 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. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-01-16.
15. Agence France Presse (2012-01-18). "Who is Jerry Yang?". NDTV. NDTV Convergence Limited. Retrieved 2013-05-27.
16. "Business Development/Japan (1994~2004)". Sony. Archived from the original on 2011-07-03. Retrieved 2012-02-22.
17. Walls, Colin (2005). Embedded software. p. 344. ISBN 9780750679541. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
18. Adleman, Leonard M. (1994-11-11). "Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems". Science. 266 (5187): 1021–4. Bibcode:1994Sci...266.1021A. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.54.2565. doi:10.1126/science.7973651. JSTOR 2885489. PMID 7973651.
19. "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.
20. Arnol'd, V. I. (1994), "20. The tennis ball theorem", Topological invariants of plane curves and caustics, University Lecture Series, 5, Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, pp. 53–58, doi:10.1090/ulect/005, ISBN 978-0-8218-0308-0, MR 1286249
21. Martinez-Maure, Yves (1996). "A note on the tennis ball theorem". American Mathematical Monthly. 103 (4): 338–340. doi:10.2307/2975192. JSTOR 2975192. MR 1383672.
22. "World's first 'smartphone' celebrates 20 years". BBC. 15 August 2014. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
23. Overbye, Dennis (7 October 2014). "Nobel Prize in Physics". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 October 2014.