1996 in science

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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.
• February 17 – NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft launched. The craft will land on asteroid 433 Eros in 2001.
• May 20 – First naked-eye observation of Comet Hale-Bopp.
• November 7 – NASA launches the Mars Global Surveyor.
• The second 9.8 m reflecting telescope opens at Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Biology

• July 5 – Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, is born.
• August 6 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms.
• The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae's genome is sequenced, the first eukaryotic genome to be fully sequenced.

Chemistry

• February 9 – Copernicium first created at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany, by Sigurd Hofmann, Victor Ninov and others.

Computer science

• January 23 – The first version of the Java programming language is released.
• February 10 – Deep Blue defeats chess grand-master Garry Kasparov for the first time.
• Lov Grover, at Bell Labs, publishes the quantum database search algorithm.
• IRCnet is founded.

Exploration

• May 23 – Swede Göran Kropp reaches Mount Everest summit alone without oxygen after having bicycled there from Sweden.

Medicine

• March – The Cochrane Library launched.
• New variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease first identified in humans, in the United Kingdom.
• Sildenafil (Viagra), a treatment for erectile disfunction, is patented by Pfizer.

Meteorology

• January 7 – A large blizzard hits the Eastern United States, killing more than 100.
• May 13 – Severe thunderstorms and a tornado in Bangladesh kills 600.
• July 18–21 – Storms provoke severe flooding on the Saguenay River in Quebec, in one of Canada's most costly natural disasters.

Technology

• Zenith introduces the first HDTV-compatible front projection television in the United States. Broadcasters, TV & PC manufacturers set industry standards for digital HDTV.
• APS film format is introduced.
• Successful demonstration of magnetic refrigeration.

Awards

• Nobel Prize
  • 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
• Turing Award for Computing: Amir Pnueli
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Nicholas John Shackleton

Births

• July 5 – Dolly the sheep (d. 2003), the world's first cloned mammal.

Deaths

• January 12 – Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (b. 1903), mathematician.
• February 20 – Solomon Asch (b. 1907), social psychologist.
• March 26 – David Packard (b. 1912), engineer.
• June 17 – Thomas Kuhn (b. 1922), philosopher of science.
• August 1 – Tadeus Reichstein (b. 1897), winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• August 9 – Sir Frank Whittle (b. 1907), aeronautical engineer.
• September 20 – Paul Erdős (b. 1913), mathematician.
• December 20 – Carl Sagan (b. 1934), astronomer.