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Overview of the events of 2007 in science
3 March 2007: A total lunar eclipse occurs (time lapse shown).
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
26 October 2007: Arthur Kornberg , Nobel Prize -winning American biochemist , dies aged 89.
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