1994 in science

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