The Elfin Diary Archives

1976

The US National Academy of Sciences reports that freons used in spray cans deplete the ozone layer in the atmosphere, resulting in increased ultraviolet radiation at the Earth’s surface. Theories employing supergravity are introduced in physics and IBM develops the inkjet printer. The French-English Concorde becomes the first supersonic airliner to operate a regular scheduled passenger service. Jimmy Carter (Democrat) is elected 39th President of the United States. Astronomers discover that Pluto is at least partially covered with frozen methane. James Elliot, E. Dunham and D. Mink, aboard the Kuiper airborne observatory of NASA, discover the rings of Uranus during an occultation of a star by the planet. US spaceprobes Vikings 1 and 2 soft-land on Mars and begin sending back direct pictures and other information from the surface of the planet; Viking 1 becomes the first spacecraft ever to soft-land on a planet other than Earth. An explosion at a pesticide plant near Seveso, Italy, a cloud of poisonous gas that spreads dioxins over 1,800 acres killing animals, mainly rabbits and chickens. No humans died, but many developed painful skin conditions; the site of the disaster is now a 105-acre park – no building or agriculture is permitted, but people are free to walk, picnic, and enjoy the 5000 trees (mainly oak) planted there. China’s Mao Zedong dies; Catholicism ceases to be the state religion of Italy. The first official womens’ cricket is played at Lords; The Muppet Show begins in the US. Films: All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver and Rocky.

1977

Sulphur-eating bacteria, giant clams and tube worms are discovered surrounding deep-sea ocean vents near the Galapagos Islands. In the USSR a baby mammoth frozen in ice for 40,000 years is recovered in good shape – dead, but in good shape! Spaceprobes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are launched on a journey to Jupiter and the outer planets. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever are the box office hits. Elvis Presley dies age 42; ‘punk’ music becomes popular. The earliest known AIDS victims are diagnosed in New York (the disease is not officially recognised until 1981). The last recorded case of smallpox found in the wild occurred in Somalia (the last recorded death from the disease was in 1978 in Birmingham, when the virus leaked from a medical research laboratory).

1978

Sweden becomes the first country to ban CFC aerosol sprays because of the harm they do to the ozone layer. Apple bring out the first disk drive for use with personal computers. A team of anthropologists and archaeologists discover the first known religious sanctuary in a cave in El Juyo, Spain; dated at about 12,000 BC; the foundations of a major Aztec temple are uncovered in the heart of Mexico City. Pope Paul VI dies August 6th; his successor, John Paul I dies somewhat mysteriously on Sept. 26th; the first non-Italian Pope since the 16th century, John Paul II, now occupies the Vatican. Two Pioneer space-probes are launched toward Venus; they represent the first American attempts to put vehicles into orbit around the planet and to land capsules there. The first baby conceived by IVF is born, in the UK. The first Christopher Reeves Superman film is released; disco music becomes popular.

1979

Margaret Thatcher becomes first woman Prime Minister of the U K. The High-Energy Astrophysical Observatory (HEAO 3) picks up gamma rays from Cygnus X and Voyager 1 discovers a ring around Jupiter. Skylab, an early US space station that had been abandoned, falls into the atmosphere as a result of an intense solar wind caused by increased sunspot activity; it breaks into pieces that land in western Australia, causing no damage. US President Jimmy Carter persuades Egypt and Israel to end their 30-year war. Civil war erupts in Iran; the Shah of Iran flees the country, leaving the way open for the Ayatollah Khomeini to return from exile and establish a theocratic Islamic Republic. Civil war rages in Afganistan; the USSR sends in troops to protect its border, which proves to be a mistake – the Afghanis quickly unite against them. 30,00 ‘boat people’ – refugees from Vietnam – are allowed into the US. The aeroplane Gossamer Albatross is the first man-powered aircraft to cross the English Channel. A severe anthrax epidemic breaks out in Sverdlovsk, USSR, killing 64 (was this a factor in renaming the town Yekaterinburg in 1991?) Kramer vs. Kramer wins lots of Oscars, Alien does not. The nuclear reactor at Unit 2 of Three Mile Island loses its water buffer through operator error; a small amount of radioactive material escapes the containment dome, but the reactor itself undergoes a partial meltdown; no one is injured – a precursor of Chernobyl (see 1986).

1980

Ronald Reagan is elected 40th President of the United States. The first artificial chromosome, for a type of yeast, is created. Uwe Fink and other astronomers report the discovery of a thin atmosphere on Pluto. Evidence from aeroplane and satellite observations show that Mayan cities were agricultural centres surrounded by extensive canals – a New World hydraulic society? The US Supreme Court rules that a microbe developed by General Electric for oil cleanup can be patented. Mount St. Helens in Washington, USA, erupts, killing 61 people and devastating a large region around the volcano. L W Alvarez, W Alvarez, F Asaro, H V Michel discover a thin layer of clay at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, a time marked by mass extinctions, including the extinction of the dinosaurs; the clay is enriched with the heavy metal iridium, leading the team to speculate that a giant body from space collided with Earth, causing the layer, later found to be worldwide, and the extinctions (see 1997). A method of using sound waves to break up kidney stones, while still in the kidney, is developed in W Germany. A successful experimental vaccine against hepatitis B is developed in America. The US scientific satellite Magsat (magnetic field satellite) crashes to Earth, after completing its eight-month mission to survey Earth’s magnetic fields. Voyager 1 flies by Saturn providing much information about the planet, its moons, and ring system- it finds the thirteenth and fourteenth moons of Saturn. Iraq invades Iran. Sony launches the Walkman. 14-year old Nigel Short (UK) becomes the youngest ever International Chess master. John Lennon (b. 1940) is shot dead in New York. The Elephant Man and Raging Bull are two big box-office hits.

1981

Robert Kirshner, August Oemler, Paul Schechter, and Stephen Shectman discover the Boötes Void – a gigantic area of space, 330 million light-years across and completely empty of galaxies; the discovery helps astronomers to understand that the structure of the Universe isn’t uniform but composed of filiaments and voids. Scientists at Ohio University are first to transfer genes from one animal to another by transferring genes from other rabbits into mice. The first practicable solar energy cell is developed. In the UK the first London marathon is run, with 7,747 people starting the race – 6,255 of them managed to finish; the Humber suspension bridge opens; at 2.22 km it was then the longest suspension bridge in the world – today (2025) it’s the fourteenth. Riots break out in British cities; in Poland, the Solidarity union organises strikes and blockades, leading to the imposition of martial law. Reggae star Bob Marley dies of cancer in Jamaica, aged only 36. The IBM personal computer is introduced, using what is to become an industry-standard disk operating system (DOS), supplied by a small company called Microsoft. The Empire Strikes Back! is the highly successful sequel to 1977’s Star Wars; Cats opens in London.

1982

Argentina invades the British Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Mrs. Thatcher orders a military task force to sail from Britain to retaliate and the Argentinians are ejected after intense fighting. In Britain, 20,000 women protest at Greenham Common US air base against the Cruise missiles sited there. There are military coups in Guatemala and Bangladesh; Israel invades Lebanon. The International Whaling Commission calls for a complete ban on commercial whaling by 1985. Tootsie and Gandhi sweep the Oscars; E.T. doesn’t, but is more popular than either. After 17 years of work, the Mary Rose, a sixteenth-century warship, is pulled out of the water in Portsmouth, England and found to be full of Tudor artefacts. Soviet spacecraft Venera 13 and Venera 14 make the first successful landings on Venus. Compact-disc (CD) players are introduced. The volcano El Chichon in Mexico erupts, sending dust and gases high into the stratosphere, where they remain for about three years and reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. The US Food and Drug Administration grants approval to Eli Lilly & Company to market human insulin produced by bacteria, the first commercial product of genetic engineering; the CDC coins the term AIDS for the advanced stage of HIV.

1983

In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s second Conservative Government is formed. Dr. Sally Ride (US) becomes the second woman to go into space. President Reagan announces the creation of a new US defence systemcalled the Strategic Defense Initiative, an orbiting network of satellites to detect and destroy enemy missiles; critics derisively nicknamed it “Star Wars”; nothing much came of it, as it soon became clear that the original concept of satellite-based lasers destroying incoming missiles couldn’t work. American troops invade the Caribbean island of Grenada. The first successful transfer of a human embryo from one woman to another is achieved. Apple Macintosh’s’s Lisa brings the mouse and pull-down menus to the personal computer while IBM’s PC-XT is the first personal computer with a hard-disk drive built into it; it’s capable of storing 10 megabytes of information. The US deploys nuclear-armed missiles across Europe; thousands protest, the US-USSR arms-limitation talks in Geneva collapse. Films: Terms of Endearment, Local Hero and The Dresser.

1984

Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States for a second term. Crack cocaine makes its first appearence, in Los Angeles, and rapidly spreads misery across the US. The American Heart Association lists smoking as a risk factor for strokes for the first time. Carbon dioxide and other volcanic gases from Lake Monoun in Cameroon kill 37 people. Soviet researchers drill the Kola Superdeep Borehole; at 12,262 metres (over 7 miles!) it’s still the world’s deepest hole. Computer developments include: optical disks for the storage of data; IBM’s megabyte RAM memory chip with four times the memory of earlier chips; Apple’s instantly popular Macintosh computer. A storm in the Mediterranean uncovers the underwater site of an 8000-year-old settlement, now known as Altit-Yam, off the coast of Israel. The first unlooted Mayan tomb found since the early 1960s is uncovered in the Guatemalan jungle; it had been sealed effectively in the fifth century AD. Michael Baillie and co-workers establish an unbroken tree-ring chronology based on Irish oak trees that extends from the present to 7272 years earlier. Peat cutters discover Lindow Man, a 2,200-year-old body preserved in a peat bog in NW England; he appears to have been ritually killed. A project to produce a Sumerian dictionary is started; envisioned as a series of heavyweight books, it has since gone online and is still being added to. Alec Jeffreys discovers the technique of genetic fingerprinting. Wilson and Higuchi of the University of California at Berkeley become the first to clone genes from an extinct species; they clone genes from a preserved skin of a quagga, a form of zebra that had been extinct for a hundred years. The first successful surgery on a foetus before birth is performed at Denver, Colorado. In Britain, the miners go on strike; the IRA attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher with a bomb at a Brighton hotel – 5 die, but the Prime Minister escapes with barely a scratch. “Yuppies” – young upwardly mobile professionals – are discovered in Western society; A Nightmare On Elm Street is the horror film of the year

1985

The International Whaling Commission bans commercial whaling. At the centre of the Milky Way, a number of string-shaped radio sources termed “threads” are detected; they are believed to be candidates for low-energy cosmic strings. Edward Tedesco observes the eclipses of Pluto by its moon Charon and determines the diameter of Pluto to be less than 1,900 miles (3,000 km). The first crew change in space occurs; a crew replaces another crew on board Soviet satellite Salyut 7 in order to do repairs. The volcano Nevada del Ruiz in northern Colombia erupts, melting snow and ice on its summit; the resulting torrent of mud sweeps into the town of Amero, killing about 21,000 of the 22,500 residents. The British Antarctic survey, which had been monitoring the ozone layer over Antarctica since 1958, announced that it was thinning at an alarming rate, and that this was wholly due to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) released into the atmosphere. French agents bomb the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand – 2 die. In Britain, miners vote to end their year-long strike. There is a major famine in Ethiopia – not the first one by any means, but the first to receive worldwide media coverage. The resulting public horror leads to an outpouring of charity and relief effort, culminating in Live Aid, a marathon charity pop concert. 17-year old Boris Becker becomes the youngest winner of the Mens Singles title at Wimbledon. The British rock group Dire Straits produce Brothers In Arms – the first audio-CD hit. Films to see: Back to the Future and Witness.

1986

At the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine a reactor meltdown releases a radioactive cloud over Europe, spreading as far as Britain and contaminating farmland. 250,000 people are evacuated; 100,000 Russians and Ukrainian may eventually die as a result of radiation-induced cancer and a further 30,000 deaths are possible world-wide. Halley’s Comet returns; disappointingly dim, it’s photographed by 5 space probes, one flying through its tail. The space shuttle Challenger blows apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, killing seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe: a faulty rubber sealing ring is to blame. All the known black-footed ferrets in the wild are captured and put into a breeding program after canine distemper kills most of the known population. The first heart, lung and liver transplant is performed, in the UK. Presidents Duvalier (of Haiti) and Marcos (of the Philippines) flee their countries. The Swedish Prime Minister is assassinated; the Indian Prime Minister survives an assassination attempt. Astronomers discover that our galaxy, the galaxies of the local group and other components of the local supercluster of galaxies move toward the “Great Attractor”, a point in the direction of the Southern Cross. The US space probe Voyager 2 passes close to Uranus and its moons at a speed of more than 32,000mph (51,000 kph), radioing data back to Earth; 10 more satellites are discovered, as well as much basic information about the system. Mir (Russian for Peace) is launched by the Soviet Union, becoming the first permanently manned space station. A US biotechnology company conducts the first field trials of genetically engineered organisms – genetically altered tobacco. A miner in the La Toca amber mine in the Dominican Republic finds a complete frog, preserved as a fossil in amber – it had croaked 35 to 40 million years ago. Lake Nyos in the Cameroon emits a strange gas that kills about 1,750 people and much of the livestock around the lake; later investigators decide that the gas was largely carbon dioxide released in an underwater eruption of the volcano that formed the lake or caused by turnover of the lake waters. The first genetically engineered vaccine for human beings is approved by the US Food and Drugs Administration. Hannah And Her Sisters is this year’s Woody Allen film. The Phantom Of The Opera musical opens in London.

1987

The US Supreme Court rejects the equal-time concept for the teaching of Creationism as a science. Supernova 1987 A, (formerly the star Sk69.202) the nearest observable supernova to Earth since 1604, allowed the first detection of a cosmic neutrino flux not coming from our Sun. The neutrino flux travelled almost at the speed of light; after a trip of 180,000 years, the light and the neutrinos arrived almost together, within a few days; this demonstrated that the rest mass of the neutrino is near zero. The last wild California condor is trapped and placed in a breeding program in a California zoo. World human population is now 5 billion, double that of 1950. Kevin Aulenback discovers the second known cache of dinosaur eggs that contain fossilised unhatched dinosaurs (probably duck-billed dinosaurs) in Canada; Wade Miller discovers a fossilised dinosaur egg that contains the oldest known embryo of any kind, probably the embryo of an allosaur from about 150 million years ago. Apple’s Macintosh II and Macintosh SE become the most powerful personal computers available while IBM brings out the Personal System/2 group of personal computers. In the UK, rapst Robert Melias becomes the first crime suspect to be convicted on the basis of DNA fingerprinting. Harvey Weiss announces the discovery of 1100 Akkadian clay tablets, the largest cache of cuneiform tablets found since 1933; the tablets, dating from about 1740 to 1725 BC, are from northern Mesopotamia and had been excavated in 1986. Yuri V. Romamenko, Soviet cosmonaut, returns to Earth from the Mir space station after 326 days in space, a new record. David Page and colleagues announce their discovery of the SRY gene that initiates maleness in mammals. A ferry capsizes off Zeebrugge, Belgium, with the loss of 187 lives. Construction finally starts on the Tunnel beneath the English Channel (first proposed in 1802). At a US-USSR summit in Washington, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev agree to ban intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Robocop and The Running Man compete at the cinema.

1988

Radio-carbon dating on the Shroud of Turin dates it to 1260 at the earliest. French and Israeli scientists announce that fossils found in a cave in Israel are the 92,000-year-old remains of modern-type Homo sapiens, more than doubling the length of time that modern humans are known to have existed. A wall on the Palatine hill in Rome is found that dates from the seventh century BC, tending to confirm legendary accounts of the foundation of Rome. Tom Dillehay and Michael Collins report that charcoal dating of artefacts found at Monte Verde in southern Chile indicates that people have been present in the Americas for at least 33,000 years. British scientists who have been monitoring wave height off of Land’s End since 1962 report that the average wave height has increased from 7.4 ft. (2.3 m) to 9.0 ft (2.7 m). George Bush (Republican) is elected 41st President of the USA; Mikhail Gorbachev is elected President of the USSR. After years of bombing and fighting, Iran and Iraq announce a ceasefire. The US Senate ratifies an international treaty intended to reduce the use of CFCs. A film, The Last Temptation of Christ, is denounced worldwide by Christians as blasphemy; a book, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, is denounced worldwide by Muslims as blasphemy. Dec. 21st: a bomb explodes on board a passenger jet over Scotland killing 270, including 11 people on the ground.

1989

Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe start to crumble; borders open and regimes fall. In Asia, the occupying Chinese forces impose martial law in Lhasa, Tibet; thousands of Chinese students demonstrate for democracy in Peking’s Tiannamen Square – tanks crush the protest, killing hundreds. Emperor Hirohito of Japan dies after a 62-year reign. Florida and Virginia allow DNA genetic “fingerprinting” as admissible evidence in some rape cases. Israeli archaeologists discover a Neanderthal skeleton while US archaeologists discover an ancient Assyrian city, Mashkanshapir, in Iraq. The Large Electron-Positron Collider begins operation in Switzerland: it is the world’s largest-ever scientific apparatus, with a circumference of 16.5 miles (it was dismantled and replaced in 2000 by the Large Hadron Collider). R.S. Pons (US) and M. Fleischmann (UK) announce that they have achieved a low-temperature method of energy generation called ‘cold fusion’, but most scientists are sceptical – so far nobody has been able to replicate their work (still true in 2025). A number of computer viruses infect computer networks; the term “computer virus” is officially defined. Meteorologists pronounce 1989 the warmest on record: this may be a sign of the greenhouse effect. 80 nations adopt a declaration agreeing to stop producing by 2000 AD chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which damage the world’s ozone layer. NASA launches the Galileo space probe to Jupiter; Voyager 2 reaches Neptune, currently furthest planet from the Sun (Pluto’s odd orbit took it inside Nuptune’s orbit from 1979 to 1999); The USSR launches its 2,000th Cosmos satellite. Mysterious “crop circles” appear in UK cornfields. U S. mathematicians discover the largest known prime number, it is 65,087 digits long (that record has been surpassed several times since; in 2024 a prime number with over 24 million digits was discovered!). The UN Population Fund predicts that world population will rise to 14.2 billion by 2100 A D (1989 population: over 5 billion, in 2025: over 8 billion). 15th April: 96 football fans die in a crush at a match in Sheffield, England. 10th November: demolition of the Berlin Wall starts. Field of Dreams and When Harry Met Sally were two cinema hits; Driving Miss Daisy took the Best Film Oscar.

1990

The USSR falls apart as its various member states opt for independence; East and West Germany formally reunite. British and French engineers meet under the sea as the Channel tunnel is linked. Ornidyl, the first new drug in 40 years to treat African sleeping sickness, is approved by the World Health Organisation. Japan launches the first Moon probe in 14 years. The US Food and Drug Administration approves Olestra, a “no-calorie fat substitute”; theoretically people will be able to eat fattening foods without gaining weight; however, embarrassing side effects force its quick withdrawal. A four-year-old girl, born with a defective immune system, becomes the first human to receive gene therapy. Pink Floyd perform The Wall in the newly-reunited Berlin. Nelson Mandela is released after 27 years in South African prisons and President de Klerk ends the 30-year ban on the African National Congress party. Films: GoodFellas and Silence of the Lambs.

1991

Astronomers discover the brightest and most distant quasar yet; it has 10 billion solar masses and a magnitude of 17.5. A close encounter for Earth: on January 18 an asteroid passed within a distance of 170,000 km, less than half the distance of the Moon. Archaeopteryx, half evolved Jurassic reptile/bird with both teeth and feathers, is challenged by a Texan palaeontologist, who claims a find 75 million years older. Oldest land dwellers: discoveries from the Ludlow bone bed in Shropshire bring to light fossils of the earliest known land dwellers, with ages of 414 million years, some 20 million years older than the previously accepted oldest land creature; they are two centipedes and an arachnid and it is possible that these were not the first creatures to live on the land. A red stain inside a pre-Bronze Age jar was found to be the remnants from wine-making carried out 5,500 years ago. The perfectly preserved body of a 5,300-year old man is found in a glacier in the Italian Alps. Mount Etna is discovered to be emitting 25 million tons of carbon dioxide a year – comparable to the output of four 1000 M W coal-fired power stations. The first close-up picture of an asteroid is taken when NASA’s Galileo flies past minor planet 951 Gaspara at a distance of 1600km. Margaret Thatcher resigns as British Prime Minister. 25th Dec.: the USSR officially ceases to exist. Films: Thelma and Louise and Unforgiven. Computer games: Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers.

1992

End of life on Earth: astronomers predict that the Earth will be destroyed in about 5,000 million years, when the Sun expands into a red giant phase; life, except for some plants, will cease in only 500 million years – because of a declining level of carbon dioxide! Life on land: the suspicion that land life began earlier than the widely accepted 470 million-years-ago view is confirmed by geologist Paul Knauth of Arizona University; life arrived on land 1,200 million years ago in the form of mats of algae and bacteria. Better late than never dept: the Vatican announces it was wrong in 1633 to have forced Galileo to recant his assertion that the Earth orbits the Sun. Civil war begins in Yugoslavia. William Jefferson Blythe IV Clinton (Democrat) is elected 42nd President of the USA. The British artist Damien Hirst exhibits a pickled shark. Problems in the British Royal family: Princess Anne divorces, Prince Andrew separates from the Duchess of York, Prince Charles separates from the Princess of Wales. Films: Howard’s End, The Players. Meanwhile, Bohemian Rhapsody and I Will Always Love You are the songs blasting out of jukeboxes everywhere.

1993

First direct detection of interstellar material: the American Ulysses spacecraft makes contact with grains of interstellar – as opposed to interplanetary – dust during its fly-by of Jupiter. A brief civil war in Russia ends when the army, under President Yeltsin, shells the Moscow parliament building and forces the surrender of political opponents. The UN Security Council votes to establish a War Crimes Tribunal – the first since 1945. Puzzles solved dept: DNA evidence proves that bones found in Russia are those of the last Russian Royal family, killed in 1918 – the UK’s Prince Phillip, a blood relative, helped with a DNA sample; DNA also proved that Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Princess Anastasia, daughter of the murdered Tsar and Tsarina, was a Polish woman named Franziska Schanzkowska; the “Schliemann Hoard”, priceless gold jewellery dug up in Troy and which disappeared from Berlin in 1945, is discovered in Russia. In Britain, the Queen and Prince Charles volunteer to pay income tax for the first time; Buckingham Palace is opened to the (paying) public – poor Royals! Films: Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park; songs: Meat Loaf belted out I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) while UB40 promised (I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You

1994

More from the Puzzles Solved dept: mathematical puzzle ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ is solved after 358 years. Warm-blooded dinosaurs? The assertion is made by US palaeontologists working on the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that it was warm blooded. Ice on Mercury? – at just a third of Earth’s distance from the Sun, Mercury’s surface is extremely hot, yet evidence suggests that there is ice at the polar regions. Priestesses? – the Church of England ordains its first women priests. Comet Shoemaker-Levy collides, spectacularly, with Jupiter (July) and astronomers speculate whether Jupiter may act as a comet catcher and thus protects the Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope takes spectacular pictures of galaxies in formation. The first flowering plants were believed to have appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago (at the beginning of the Cretaceous period) but this view is exploded by Bruce Cornet (New York) who finds evidence of angiosperms (flowering plants) in the Triassic period – 220 million years ago. Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South African President; South Africa rejoins the British Commonwealth. The Channel Tunnel (started 1987) is formally opened; approximately 900 lives are lost when a car ferry sinks in the Baltic. British artist Damien Hirst exhibits a pickled sheep. The Italian Prime Minister is investigated for bribery and corruption. The IRA announces a cease-fire; Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty. Popular films: Four Weddings And A Funeral, True Lies and The Madness of King George. Songs: everyone is wigging out to Whigfield’s Saturday Night but Love Is All Around is the song that is all around…

1995

Big Bang gas found: evidence of the matter formed at the time of the Big Bang and not condensed into galaxies, which had eluded astronomers for over 25 years, is confirmed; it is of a concentration (one atom per 100 cubic metres), sufficient to account for about 3% of the missing mass not yet identified by astronomers. Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank, declared bankruptcy after one of its traders lost £625 million of its assets in unauthorised transactions. Terrorism in Japan: a deliberate release of nerve gas on the Tokyo Metro kills 12 and injures hundreds, two phosgene gas releases in Yokohama produce more panic and injuries; leaders and members of the doomsday Aum Shinryko sect are arrested. Terrorism in the USA: 166 die when a bomb explodes in Oklahoma City; two members of a US anti-government group are arrested. Fighting escalates in Bosnia and NATO bombs Serb military bases; the Serbs begin to withdraw, and agree to peace talks. The official tally of AIDS cases worldwide passes 1 million. Caves containing undisturbed cave painting and engravings up to 20,000 years old are discovered in southern France. The US space shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian space station Mir, the first such international docking for 20 years; aboard Mir, Russian cosmonaut breaks the record for the longest stay in space: 366 days. After months of protests by animal rights groups, the British Meat and Livestock Commission announces the banning of the transport of live calves in cruel veal crates. Big films of the year: Nixon, Sense and Sensibility and Braveheart.

1996

The sole remaining specimen of the Venezuelan Passiflora lourdesae, wiped out by development of its native habitat, is discovered in a greenhouse in Bristol, UK. Comet Hyakutake is discovered by a Japanese amateur astronomer on January 30; it flies by Earth on March 24 at a distance of only 15.4 million km US scientists identify globules containing fossilised micro-organisms in a meteorite thought to have originated on Mars 15 million years ago; Mars Attacks! is one of the year’s comic films. The DVD video disc appears. Archaeologists discover: an unknown ancient culture in the heart of the Amazon jungle, together with paintings 13,000-14,000 years old, older than any previous recorded in the New World; the oldest (known) European settlement in the New World – a French fort built in 1562 in South Carolina. Palaeontologists from Chicago University, working in the Sahara’s northern edge, discover fragments of the skull of what could be the largest carnivorous dinosaur yet known. The British government admits that BSE (‘mad cow disease’) could be passed on to humans through eating beef. Representatives of 53 African countries meet in Cairo and declare Africa to be a nuclear-free zone. Prince Charles and Princess Diana divorce. Romono Prodi becomes Italy’s 55th postwar Prime Minister; Bill Clinton is elected President of the United States for a second term. In California, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is fined for air pollution after erecting a burning cross in his front garden. Also in California, two students develop the Google seach engine; the name was an unintentional mispelling of googol, a very large number written as 10¹⁰⁰ (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Perhaps they should have Googled it first?

1997

President Clinton announces a ban on all federally funded human cloning research. In the UK: the Labour Party wins a landslide victory in the General Election and Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister;Diana, Princess of Wales dies,along with two others, when the car in which they’re travelling crashes in Paris; JK Rowling publishes Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book featuring the bespectacled boy wizard hero. A research team at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, create the first clone of an adult animal – a sheep named Dolly; led by Ian Wilmut, they took a single cell and fused it with an unfertilised egg from which all of the DNA had been removed; Wilmut says that the technique could eventually be applied to humans, producing cloned cells to help in the treatment of cancer and other diseases. IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, defeats former world champion Boris Spassky. US scientists say they have discovered firm geological evidence for the cometary impact that apparently caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (see 1980). Comet Hale-Bopp (discovered 1995) puts on a splendid show in the Earth skies; a widespread rumour that an alien spaceship is riding in its tail leads to the mass suicide of 37 members of a US cult, who hoped to join the aliens. Films: Men in Black and Flubber. Britain’s National Trust votes to ban stag-hunting on its land. DNA testing shows that Adrian Targett, a 42-year old history teacher in Somerset, UK, is a direct descendant, through his mother, of the 5,000-year old ‘Cheddar Man’ found in the Cheddar caves; even the British Royal family can only trace its line back to the 9th century!

1998

The United Nations designates 1998 as the Year of the Oceans in a bid to unlock the mysteries of the deep, particularly how global weather patterns are influenced – or indeed determined – by what goes on under the sea. April sees the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, bringing an end to (most of) The Troubles; Northern Ireland politicians John Hume and David Trimble are jointly awarded the NobelPeace Prize for their work on this historic achievment. Popster Elton John ecomes Sir Elton. The US Senate votes against a motion to consider a bill to seeking to ban human cloning; this follows the claim made in January by Richard Seed, a Chicago physicist, that he planned to attempt to clone human beings. A US subsidiary of PPL Therapeutics, the Scottish company that produced Dolly the cloned sheep, announced that it had cloned a Holstein calf, named Mr Jefferson.

1999

1.2 billion year-old worms: Blair Hedges (Pennsylvania State University) traces the origins of nematode worms to 1,200 millions years ago. The European Union introduced the Euro as the European single currency. Eight foreign tourists are murdered in Uganda. Knotty solutions: physicists Fink and Young of Cambridge University have, by using the mathematics that describes protein folding, discovered over 80 new methods of tying a tie. More usefully, the maths can also quantify attributes such as symmetry and breadth – as well as how difficult the knot is to unravel. Melting Mars: flood channels were created on Mars when molten rock thawed the frozen surface of the planet, according to geophysicists McKenzie and Nimmo of Cambridge University. Melting Mars: flood channels were created on Mars when molten rock thawed the frozen surface of the planet, according to geophysicists McKenzie and Nimmo of Cambridge University; magma flowing beneath the Martian surface pushed other rocks apart to make long faults and also melted the permafrost from below. The High-Z Supernova Search Team becomes the first team to publish evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Songs: Everyone is dancing to Livin’ la Vida Loca and Mambo No. 5 before sitting down to listen to to Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen). Films: The Mummy, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Some of the year’s obituaries are: Singer Dusty Springfield, age 59; Joe Demaggio, American baseball legend and one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe, age 84; Yehudi Menuhin, violinist and humanist, age 82; film director (Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining) Stanley Kubrick, age 70. Charges of fraud and corruption lead the European Union Commissioners to resign en bloc. In March, NATO planes begin the bombing of Serbia; the century began with war in the Balkans, and looks like ending the same way.