1985 in science
From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
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The year 1985 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.
Contents
Chemistry
- The fullerene Buckminsterfullerene (C60) is first intentionally prepared by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in the United States.[1]
Computer science
- March 15 – The first commercial Internet domain name, in the top-level domain .com, is registered in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- November 20 – Microsoft Windows operating system released.
Environment
- May 16 – Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey announce discovery of the ozone hole.[2][3][4]
Exploration
- September 1 – The wreck of the RMS Titanic (1912) in the North Atlantic is located by a joint American-French expedition led by Dr. Robert Ballard (WHOI) and Jean-Louis Michel (Ifremer) using side-scan sonar from RV Knorr.[5][6]
Mathematics
- March – Louis de Branges de Bourcia publishes proof of de Branges's theorem.[7]
- September – Dennis Sullivan publishes proof of the No wandering domain theorem.[8]
- December – Publication of the ATLAS of Finite Groups.
- Jean-Pierre Serre provides partial proof that a Frey curve cannot be modular, showing that a proof of the semistable case of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture would imply Fermat's Last Theorem.
- Leonard Adleman, Roger Heath-Brown and Étienne Fouvry prove that the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem holds for infinitely many odd primes p.[9]
Medicine
- February 19 – Artificial heart patient William J. Schroeder becomes the first such patient to leave hospital.
- March 4 – The United States Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS infection, used since this date for testing all U.S. blood donations.
- March–May – Joshua Silver develops an adjustable corrective lens.
- October 17 – The British House of Lords decides the legal case of Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority[10] which sets the significant precedent of Gillick competence, i.e. that a child of 16 or under may be competent to consent to contraception or – by extension – other medical treatment without requiring parental permission or knowledge.
- Publication of a classified bibliography of 3500 reports on controlled trials in perinatal medicine published since 1940.[11]
- New York-based neurologist Oliver Sacks publishes The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.
Physics
Technology
- January 1 – The first British mobile phone calls are made.[12][13]
- Atomic force microscope invented by Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate and Christopher Berger.[14]
Awards
- Nobel Prizes
- Physics – Klaus von Klitzing – for his discovery of the quantization of electrical resistance
- Chemistry – Herbert A. Hauptman, Jerome Karle
- Medicine – Michael S. Brown, Joseph L. Goldstein
- Turing Award – Richard Karp – for his work on computational complexity theory
Births
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Deaths
- March 10 – C. B. van Niel (b. 1897), Dutch American microbiologist.
- April 20 – Charles Richter (b. 1900), American geophysicist and inventor.
- July 20 – Bruno de Finetti (b. 1906), Italian statistician.
- August 31 – Frank Macfarlane Burnet (b. 1899), Australian virologist best known for his contributions to immunology, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- September 6 – Rodney Porter (b. 1917), English biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- September 7 – George Pólya (b. 1887), Hungarian mathematician.
- September 10 – Ernst Öpik (b. 1893), Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist.
- October 22 – Thomas Townsend Brown (b. 1905), American inventor.
- November 24 – László Bíró (b. 1899), Hungarian inventor.
- c. December 26 – Dian Fossey (b. 1932), American primatologist (murdered).
References
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- ↑ [1985] 3 All ER 402 (HL).
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