1991 in science

The year 1991 in science and technology involved many significant events, some listed below.

List of years in science (table)
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Astronomy and space exploration

• May 18 – Helen Sharman becomes the first British person in space, flying with the Soyuz TM-12 mission.^[1]
• October 29 – The Galileo probe becomes the first spacecraft to visit an asteroid (951 Gaspra).
• Steven Balbus and John F. Hawley publish their insights on magnetorotational instability.^[2]
• Asteroid 6859 Datemasamune is discovered by Masahiro Koishikawa.
• Asteroid 11514 Tsunenaga is discovered by Masahiro Koishikawa.
• There are four lunar eclipses: three penumbral on January 30, July 26, and June 27, and one minor partial lunar eclipse on December 21.
• There are two solar eclipses: one annular eclipse on January 15, and a very long total eclipse on July 11 (lasting 6 minutes and 53 seconds).

Chemistry

• Carbon nanotubes discovered in the insoluble material of arc-burned graphite rods by Sumio Iijima of NEC.^[3][4]

Computer science

• February 26 – Tim Berners-Lee introduces WorldWideWeb (the first web browser), and a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
• May 14 – Nicola Pellow, an intern working under the direction of Berners-Lee, introduces Line Mode Browser, the first cross-platform web browser.
• June 5 – Phil Zimmermann posts the first Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) data encryption program.^[5]
• June 23 – The video game Sonic the Hedgehog is first released, propelling the Sega Genesis 16-bit console into mass popularity.
• August 6 – The first website goes online at CERN.^[6][7][8][9]
• The Trojan Room coffee pot at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England, inspires the first webcam.
• October - Apple releases the PowerBook laptop computer.

Conservation

• October 1 – The New Zealand Resource Management Act 1991 comes into effect.

Geophysics

• Alan Hildebrand and others provide support for the Alvarez hypothesis for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event by proposing the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico as the impact site for a large asteroid 66 million years ago.^[10][11][12]
• The Ames crater impact structure is identified in Major County, Oklahoma.

Mathematics

• July – English physicist Philip Candelas and colleagues show that mirror symmetry could be used to solve problems in enumerative geometry.^[13]
• Qiudong Wang produces a global solution to the n-body problem.^[14]

Physics

• January 1 – Finland joins CERN.
• July 1 – Poland joins CERN.
• October 15 – the "Oh-My-God particle", the first ultra-high-energy cosmic ray measured at an energy of 3×10²⁰ eV (40,000,000 times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced in a particle accelerator), is observed at the University of Utah HiRes observatory in Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.

Physiology and medicine

• Takotsubo cardiomyopathy first studied.

Technology

• July 1 – World's first GSM telephone call made in Finland.

Publications

• The first open-access scientific online archive, arXiv, is begun as a preprint service for physicists, initiated by Paul Ginsparg.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
  • Chemistry – Richard R. Ernst
  • Medicine – Erwin Neher, Bert Sakmann
• Turing Award – Robin Milner

Births

• February 28 – Sheree Atcheson, Sri Lankan-Irish computer scientist

Deaths

• January 30 – John Bardeen (b. 1908), American physicist, co-inventor of the transistor and twice winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• February 6 – Salvador Luria (b. 1912), Italian-born biologist, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• February 23 – Sir Charles Illingworth (b. 1899), British surgeon.
• March 1 – Edwin H. Land (b. 1909), American inventor of the Land Camera.
• June 2 – Mary Loveless (b. 1899), American immunologist.
• June 5 – Min Chueh Chang (b. 1908), Chinese American embryologist.
• July 4 – Victor Chang (b. 1936), Australian cardiac surgeon, murdered.
• December 2 – Anne Beloff-Chain (b. 1921), British biochemist.

References

•  1990s portal
•  Science portal

1. "1991: Sharman becomes first Briton in space". BBC News. 1991-05-18. from the original on 2008-03-07. Retrieved 2008-02-01.
2. Balbus, Steven A.; Hawley, John F. (1991). "A powerful local shear instability in weakly magnetized disks". The Astrophysical Journal. 376: 214–233. Bibcode:1991ApJ...376..214B. doi:10.1086/170270.
3. Iijima, Sumio (7 November 1991). "Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon". Nature. 354 (6348): 56–58. Bibcode:1991Natur.354...56I. doi:10.1038/354056a0. S2CID 4302490.
4. Monthioux, Marc; Kuznetsov, Vladimir L. (2006). "Who should be given the credit for the discovery of carbon nanotubes?" (PDF). Carbon. 44 (9): 1621. doi:10.1016/j.carbon.2006.03.019. Retrieved 2012-02-03.
5. Zimmermann, Philip (2001-06-05). . Archived from the original on 2011-05-14. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
6. "Welcome to info.cern.ch, the website of the world's first-ever web server". CERN. from the original on 27 May 2008. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
7. "World Wide Web—Archive of world's first website". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
8. . 6 August 1991. Archived from the original on 12 May 2008. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
9. "The original post to alt.hypertalk describing the WorldWideWeb Project". Google Groups. 9 August 1991. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
10. Pope, Kevin O.; et al. (9 May 1991). "Mexican site for K/T impact crater?". Nature. 351 (6322): 105. Bibcode:1991Natur.351..105P. doi:10.1038/351105a0. S2CID 36707836.
11. Hildebrand, Alan R.; Penfield, Glen T.; Kring, David A.; Pilkington, Mark; Zanoguera, Antonio Camargo; Jacobsen, Stein B.; Boynton, William V. (September 1991). "Chicxulub Crater: a possible Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary impact crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico". Geology. 19 (9): 867–871. Bibcode:1991Geo....19..867H. doi:10.1130/0091-7613(1991)019<0867:CCAPCT>2.3.CO;2.
12. Schulte, Peter; et al. (2010). "The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous- Paleogene Boundary" (PDF). Science. 327 (5970): 1214–1218. Bibcode:2010Sci...327.1214S. doi:10.1126/science.1177265. PMID 20203042. S2CID 2659741.
13. Candelas, Philip; de la Ossa, Xenia; Green, Paul; Parks, Linda (1991). "A pair of Calabi–Yau manifolds as an exactly soluble superconformal field theory". Nuclear Physics B. 359 (1): 21–74. Bibcode:1991NuPhB.359...21C. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(91)90292-6.
14. Wang, Qiudong (1991). "The global solution of the n-body problem". Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. 50 (1): 73–88. Bibcode:1991CeMDA..50...73W. doi:10.1007/BF00048987. ISSN 0923-2958. S2CID 118132097.