1984 in science
The year 1984 in science and technology involved some significant events.
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Astronomy and space exploration
- February 7 – Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered space walk.
- The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the United States converts the 36-foot radio telescope on Kitt Peak (originally built in 1967) to the ARO 12m Radio Telescope.
Biology
- First known case of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in England.[1]
- The enzyme telomerase is discovered by Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn in the ciliate Tetrahymena.[2]
- Danish physiologist Steen Willadsen first successfully uses cells from early embryos to clone a mammal (sheep) by nuclear transfer at the British Agricultural Research Council's Institute of Animal Physiology, Cambridge.[3][4]
Chemistry and physics
- Peter Kramer[5] and Dan Shechtman[6] publish their discoveries of what will soon afterwards be named quasicrystals.[7]
- Hiroshi Kobayashi and colleagues announce synthesis of tetrakis(3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)borate ("BARF").[8]
Computer science
- January 24 – Apple Computer places the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States. It will be the first successful PC to use a graphical user interface.
- June 6 – The Tetris tile-matching video game, designed by Alexey Pajitnov, is launched in the Soviet Union.[9]
History of science
- Robert Gwyn Macfarlane publishes Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth.
Paleontology
- The fossil skeleton of the hominid "Turkana Boy" is discovered in Kenya.
Physiology and medicine
- February 3 – Dr. John Buster and the research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.
- April 22 – Dr. Robert Gallo and Margaret Heckler of United States Public Health Service announce the discovery of HTLV-III as the virus that causes AIDS.
- May 10 – Barbara H. Bowman and Oliver Smithies show that variations in haptoglobins are due to genetic polymorphisms.[10]
Technology
- May 5 – Itaipu Dam in South America begins to generate hydroelectricity.
- July 21 – In Jackson, Michigan, a factory robot crushes a worker against a safety bar in apparently the first robot-related death in the United States.
Awards
Births
- May 14 – Mark Zuckerberg, American computer programmer and entrepreneur, co-founder of social media platform Facebook.
Deaths
- February 21 – Anna Baetjer (b. 1899), American toxicologist.
- April 8 – Pyotr Kapitsa (b. 1894), Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate.
- April 15 – Grete Hermann (b. 1901), German mathematician and philosopher
- May 13 – Stanislaw Ulam (b. 1909), Polish American mathematician.
- May 24 – Sir Stanley Hooker (b. 1907), English aeronautical engineer.
- August 6 – Abraham Lilienfeld (b. 1920), American epidemiologist.
- August 11 – George Streisinger (b. 1927), Hungarian American molecular biologist, the first person to clone a vertebrate.
- October 20 – Paul Dirac (b. 1902), English-born physicist.
- November 20 – Charles C. Conley (b. 1933), American mathematician working on dynamical systems.
- December 20 – Stanley Milgram (b. 1933), American social psychologist.
gollark: Thus bad.
gollark: It does NOT allow random access.
gollark: Hmm, so, designoidal idea:- files have the following metadata: filename, last modified time, maybe permissions (I may not actually need this), size, checksum, flags (in case I need this later; probably just compression format?)- each version of a file in an archive has this metadata in front of it- when all the files in some set of data are archived, a header gets written to the end with all the file metadata plus positions- when backup is rerun, the system™️ just checks the last modified time of everything and sees if its local copies are newer, and if so appends them to the end; when it is done a new header is added containing all the files- when a backup needs to be extracted, it just reads the end, finds the latest versions and decompresses stuff at the right offsetThere are some important considerations here: it should be able to deal with damaged/partial files, encryption would be nice to have (it would probably work to just run it through authenticated AES-whatever when writing), adding new files shouldn't require tons of seeking, and it might be necessary to store backups on FAT32 disks so maybe it needs to be able of using multiple files somehow.
gollark: I have been pondering an osmarksarchiveformat™ because I dislike the existing ones somewhat. Specifically for backups and append-only-ish access. Thusly, thoughts on the design (crossposted from old esolangs)?
gollark: If you run too much current through beans they may vaporise/burn/etc.
References
- Brown, David (2001-06-19). "The 'recipe for disaster' that killed 80 and left a £5bn bill". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 2014-12-02.
- Greider, Carol W.; Blackburn, Elizabeth H. (December 1985). "Identification of a Specific Telomere Terminal Transferase Activity in Tetrahymena Extracts". Cell. 43 (2:1): 405–13. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(85)90170-9. PMID 3907856.
- Willadsen, S. M. (1986). "Nuclear transplantation in sheep embryos". Nature. 320 (6057): 63–65. Bibcode:1986Natur.320...63W. doi:10.1038/320063a0. PMID 3951549.
- Willadsen, S. M. (1989). "Cloning of sheep and cow embryos". Genome. 31 (2): 956–62. doi:10.1139/g89-167.
- Kramer, P.; Neri, R. (1984). "On periodic and non-periodic space fillings of Em obtained by projection". Acta Crystallographica. A40 (5): 580. doi:10.1107/S0108767384001203.
- Shechtman, D.; Blech, I.; Gratias, D.; Cahn, J. (1984). "Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry". Physical Review Letters. 53 (20): 1951–4. Bibcode:1984PhRvL..53.1951S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.1951.
- Levine, Dov; Steinhardt, Paul Joseph (1984). "Quasicrystals: A New Class of Ordered Structures". Physical Review Letters. 53 (26): 2477–80. Bibcode:1984PhRvL..53.2477L. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.2477.
- Nishida, H.; Takada, N.; Yoshimura, M.; Sonods, T.; Kobayshi, H. (1984). "Tetrakis(3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)borate: Highly Lipophilic Stable Anionic Agent for Solvent-Extraction of Cations". Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan. 57 (9): 2600–2604. doi:10.1246/bcsj.57.2600.
- Paul, Franklin (2009-06-02). "At 25, Tetris still eyeing growth". Reuters. Retrieved 2014-12-02.
- Maeda, Nobuyo; Yang, Funmei; Barnett, Don R.; Bowman, Barbara H.; Smithies, Oliver (1984). "Duplication within the haptoglobin Hp 2 gene". Nature. 309 (5964): 131–135. Bibcode:1984Natur.309..131M. doi:10.1038/309131a0. PMID 6325933.
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