Overview of the events of 2007 in science
The year 2007 involved many significant scientific events and discoveries, some of which are listed below.
Events, discoveries and inventions
- 9 January – Apple Inc.'s first iPhone smartphone is announced by Steve Jobs at Macworld in San Francisco;[1] it is released in the United States on 29 June.
- 12 January – Comet McNaught reaches perihelion and becomes visible from Earth during daylight.[2]
- 14 January – Scientists at the Roslin Institute announce they have genetically engineered chickens to lay eggs containing cancer-fighting proteins.[3]
- 28 February – The New Horizons space probe makes a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter to change its trajectory towards Pluto.
- 3–4 March – A total lunar eclipse occurs, visible in some parts of the Americas and Asia, and in all of Europe and Africa.[4]
- 19 March – A partial solar eclipse occurs, visible in Asia.
- 10 April – Spectroscopic analysis of HD 209458 b, an extrasolar planet, provides the first evidence of atmospheric water vapor beyond the Solar System.
- 24 April – The potentially habitable exoplanet Gliese 581 c is discovered in the constellation Libra.[5]
- 27 April – US researchers simulate half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.[6]
- May – High Resolution Fly's Eye Observatory (HiRes) and Pierre Auger Observatory present their results suggesting a confirmation for the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit, the theoretical limit for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays interacting with the Cosmic Microwave Background.
- 5 June – NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes its second flyby of Venus en route to Mercury, which it reaches in 2011.
- 2 July – Venus and Saturn are in conjunction, with a separation of 46 arcseconds.
- 28 August – A total lunar eclipse occurs, visible in some parts of the Americas and Asia, and all of Australasia and the Pacific Ocean.
- 11 September – A partial solar eclipse occurs, visible in southern areas of South America.
- 27 September – NASA's Dawn spacecraft is launched, beginning its journey to the asteroid belt objects Vesta and Ceres. It reached Vesta in 2011, and Ceres in 2015.[7]
- 24 October
- 5 November – The Open Handset Alliance launches the Android mobile operating system.
Prizes
Abel Prize
Nobel Prize
Deaths
- 20 February – F. Albert Cotton (b. 1930), American chemist known for research on transition metal chemistry
- 22 February – Lucille Farrier Stickel (b. 1915), American wildlife toxicologist
- 23 March – Paul Cohen (b. 1934), American mathematician, winner of the 1966 Fields Medal
- 27 March – Paul Lauterbur (b. 1929), American chemist, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in developing magnetic resonance imaging
- 4 April – Karen Spärck Jones (b. 1935), English computer scientist
- 7 July – Dame Anne McLaren (b. 1927), English developmental biologist
- 23 July – Ernst Otto Fischer (b. 1918), German winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work in the area of organometallic chemistry
- 12 August – Ralph Asher Alpher (b. 1921), American cosmologist
- 29 September – Katsuko Saruhashi (b. 1920), Japanese geochemist
- 26 October – Arthur Kornberg (b. 1918), American biochemist, winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of DNA
See also
References