1996 in science

The year 1996 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

The cloning process that produced Dolly.

• January 30 – Comet Hyakutake is discovered.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• February 17 – NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft launched. The craft landed on asteroid 433 Eros in 2001.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• May – First naked-eye observation of Comet Hale-Bopp.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• June 4 – The European Space Agency's Cluster is lost when the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket fails, self-destructing 37 seconds after launch from the Guiana Space Centre because of a software bug in the computer control system.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• October 3 – Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez demonstrate the existence of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy, later identified as a black hole.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• November 7 – NASA launches the Mars Global Surveyor.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• The second 9.8 m reflecting telescope opens at Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Biology

• July 5 – Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, is born at The Roslin Institute in Scotland.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• August 6 – NASA announces that the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite thought to originate from Mars, may contain evidence of primitive life-forms;<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> further tests are inconclusive.
• The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae's genome is sequenced, the first eukaryotic genome to be fully sequenced.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Chemistry

• February 9 – Copernicium first created at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany, by Sigurd Hofmann, Victor Ninov and others.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Computer science

• January
  • The Google web search engine originates as "BackRub", a research project using PageRank by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University, California.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • First USB specification issued.
• January 23 – The first version of the Java programming language is released.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• February 10 – Deep Blue defeats chess grand-master Garry Kasparov for the first time.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• April 3 – Jennifer Ringley becomes an early practitioner of lifecasting (video stream), from her dorm room at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• October – The Shetland Times and The Shetland News become involved in a landmark legal case over alleged copyright infringement and deep linking in their websites.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The page ranking web search engine RankDex is originated by Robin Li.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>USPTO,

"Hypertext Document Retrieval System and Method" Template:Webarchive, US Patent number: 5920859, Inventor: Yanhong Li, Filing date: 5 February 1997, Issue date: 6 July 1999.</ref>

• Brewster Kahle, with Bruce Gilliat, develops the Wayback Machine software to crawl and archive World Wide Web pages.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• Lov Grover, at Bell Labs, publishes the quantum database search algorithm.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• IRCnet is founded.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Exploration

• May 23 – Swede Göran Kropp reaches Mount Everest summit alone without oxygen after having bicycled there from Sweden.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Medicine

• March
  • The Cochrane Library launched.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • The role of CCR5 in HIV/AIDS infection begins to be published.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• July 7–12 – XI International AIDS Conference, 1996, Vancouver, reports major advances in the management of HIV/AIDS including combination therapy (the "triple cocktail") using protease inhibitors.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Within a week after the conference, over 75,000 patients who have been using antibiotics and chemotherapy as treatment against opportunistic infections begin an effective antiviral regimen which greatly increases their immune system strength and therefore their health.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• New variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease first identified in humans, in the United Kingdom.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• Montreal Cognitive Assessment is created by Ziad Nasreddine in Montreal, Quebec.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• Donepezil (Aricept), a palliative treatment for moderate Alzheimer's disease, is approved in the United States.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Sildenafil (Viagra), a treatment for erectile dysfunction, is patented by Pfizer.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Meteorology

• January 7 – A large blizzard hits the Eastern United States, killing 60.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
• May 15 – Severe thunderstorms and a tornado in Bangladesh kills at least 443 people.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• July 18–21 – Storms provoke severe flooding on the Saguenay River in Quebec,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> in one of Canada's most costly natural disasters.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Paleontology

• August – The first fossil specimen of the dinosaur named Sinosauropteryx prima is uncovered in China; it is the first theropod to show evidence of feathers.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Philosophy

• Australian philosopher David Chalmers publishes The Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Technology

• Zenith introduces the first HDTV-compatible front projection television in the United States. Broadcasters, TV & PC manufacturers set industry standards for digital HDTV.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• APS film format is introduced.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Publications

• May – Sokal affair: American mathematical physicist Alan Sokal hoaxes the editors into publishing a deliberately nonsensical paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", in a "science wars" issue of the journal Social Text (Duke University Press)<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> as a critique of the intellectual rigor of postmodernism in academic cultural studies.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine publishes La Fin des certitudes (translated as The End of Certainty: time, chaos, and the new laws of nature).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• French-born archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat publishes How Writing Came About.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Awards

• Nobel Prize<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • Physics: David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff, Robert C. Richardson
  • Chemistry: Robert Curl, Sir Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley
  • Medicine: Peter C. Doherty, Rolf M. Zinkernagel
• Kyoto Prize
  • Willard Van Orman Quine is awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for his "outstanding contributions to the progress of philosophy in the 20th century by proposing numerous theories based on keen insights in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of language."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Turing Award for Computing: Amir Pnueli<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Nicholas John Shackleton<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Births

• July 5 – Dolly (d. 2003), Scottish sheep, the world's first cloned mammal.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Deaths

• January 12 – Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (b. 1903), Dutch mathematician.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• February 20 – Solomon Asch (b. 1907), Polish American social psychologist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• March 19 – Chen Jingrun (b. 1933), Chinese mathematician.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• March 26 – David Packard (b. 1912), American electrical engineer.<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Cbignore</ref>
• June 6 – George Davis Snell (b. 1903), American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• June 17 – Thomas Kuhn (b. 1922), American philosopher of science.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• August 1 – Tadeusz Reichstein (b. 1897), Polish-Swiss winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• August 9 – Sir Frank Whittle (b. 1907), English aeronautical engineer.<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Cbignore</ref>
• August 12 – Victor Ambartsumian (b. 1908), Soviet Armenian theoretical astrophysicist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• September 1 – Karl Kehrle (Brother Adam) (b. 1898), British Benedictine monk and beekeeper.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• September 10 – Hans List (b. 1896), Austrian inventor.<ref>HANS LIST 1896-1996</ref>
• September 20 – Paul Erdős (b. 1913), Hungarian-born mathematician.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• October 5 – Seymour Cray (b. 1925), American supercomputer architect.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• November 13 – Bobbie Vaile (b. 1959), Australian astrophysicist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• November 19 – Grace Bates (b. 1914), American mathematician.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• November 21 – Abdus Salam (b. 1926), Punjabi-born winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• December 20 – Carl Sagan (b. 1934), American astronomer.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>