1998 in science

The year 1998 in science and technology involved many events, some of which are included below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January–September –
  High-z Supernova Search Team led by Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt publish evidence that the expansion rate of the universe is increasing.^[1][2][3]
• January 6 – The Lunar Prospector spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon and later finds evidence for frozen water on the Moon's surface.
• February 26 – Total solar eclipse
• March 2 – Data sent from the
  Galileo space probe indicates that Jupiter's moon Europa
  has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice.
• March 5 –
  Clementine probe orbiting the Moon
  has found enough water in polar craters to support a human colony and rocket-fuelling station.
• March 13 – Penumbral lunar eclipse
• July 5 – Japan launches a probe to Mars, and thus joins the United States and Russia as a space-exploring nation.
• August 8 – Penumbral lunar eclipse
• August 22 – Annular solar eclipse
• September 6 – Penumbral lunar eclipse
• October 29 – Space Shuttle Discovery blasts-off with 77-year-old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space up to that time. He became the first American to orbit Earth on February 20, 1962.
• November 20 – Zarya, the first module of the International Space Station, is launched.
• The first of four 8.4 m reflecting telescopes opens in the Very Large Telescope program of the European Southern Observatory at Cerro Paranal in Chile.

Botany

• The
  APG System of plant classification.^[4]

• February 10 –
  W3C
  .
• June 2 – The
  CIH virus is discovered in Taiwan
  .
• August 15 –
  Apple releases the iMac
  .
• September 4 – Google, Inc. is founded in Menlo Park, California, by Stanford University PhD candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin to promote their web search engine.
• November 7 –
  sixth generation home video game console
  , in Japan.
• The first working 2-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance computer is demonstrated at the University of California, Berkeley.
• Tiger Electronics launch the Furby electronic toy, the first domestic robot.

Geology

• February 4 – The 5.9
  Mercalli intensity
  of VII (Very strong). With 2,323 killed, and 818 injured, damage is considered extreme.
• March 14 – An earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale hits southeastern Iran.
• May 30 – A 6.6 magnitude earthquake hits northern Afghanistan killing up to 5,000.
• July 17 – The 7.0 M_w 
  Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). This submarine earthquake
  triggered a landslide that caused a destructive tsunami, leaving 2,183–2,700 dead and thousands injured.

• Luca Cardelli and Andrew D. Gordon develop ambient calculus.
• Thomas Callister Hales (almost certainly) proves the Kepler conjecture.

Paleontology

• September 11 – First portion of upper body (an upper arm bone, followed later by the skull) of "Little Foot" (Stw 573), a nearly complete young female Australopithecus fossil skeleton capable of walking upright is found in the cave system of Sterkfontein, South Africa eventually dated at around 3.67 million years BP.^[5]

Physics

• January 1 – Argentinian physicist Juan Maldacena publishes a landmark paper initiating the study of AdS/CFT correspondence, which links string theory and quantum gravity.^[6]
• May 11 & 13 –
  Nuclear testing: The Pokhran-II: India detonates the five nuclear devices in Pokhran Test Range, an Indian Army
  base.
• May 28 – Nuclear testing: The Chagai-I: In response to India, Pakistan conducts five underground and simultaneous nuclear weapon-testing experiments in the Chagai Hills, thus becoming the first nuclear weapon state in the Muslim world and the seventh in the world.
• May 30 – Nuclear testing: The Chagai-II: As part of a tit-for-tat policy, a final plutonium implosion test is carried out in the Kharan Desert.
• June 5 – Experimental proof is obtained that
  neutrinos have mass.^[7]

• January 14 – Researchers in Dallas, Texas, present findings about an enzyme that slows aging and cell death (apoptosis).
• February 19 – RNA interference first elucidated in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.
• February 28 –
  autistic spectrum disorders believed to have first presented soon after receipt of the MMR vaccine.^[8][9]
• March 27 – The
  Viagra for use as a treatment for erectile dysfunction
  , the first pill to be approved for this condition in the United States.
• May – Friedrich-Wilhelm Mohr performs the first
  robotically assisted coronary artery bypass surgery, at the Leipzig Heart Centre in Germany using the da Vinci Surgical System;^{[citation needed]} later in the year, Ralph Damiano performs on 17 patients in Pennsylvania.^[10]
• July 17 – Biologists report in the journal Science how they sequenced the genome of the bacterium that causes syphilis, Treponema pallidum.
• August –
  bionic arm, is fitted.^[11]
• September 23 – The world's first medically successful hand transplantation is carried out by a team of surgeons in France.^[12]
• December 11
  • Bruce Beutler and colleagues publish their discovery that Toll-like receptor 4 functions as a lipopolysaccharide sensing receptor.^[13]
  • The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans becomes the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequencing published.^[14]
• Fred Gage and Peter Eriksson discover and announce neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus.

Technology

• April 5 – In Japan, the
  Honshū, at a cost of about US$3.8 billion, opens to traffic, becoming the longest-span suspension bridge
  in the world.
• August 24 – The first experiments with an
  RFID implant carried out by Kevin Warwick in the UK.^[15]

• Susan Greenfield appointed Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.^[16]
• Café Scientifique first organized in the UK.

Publications

• Jacques Heyman – Structural Analysis: A Historical Approach (Cambridge University Press)^[17]

Awards

• William Timothy Gowers, Maxim Kontsevich and Curtis T. McMullen
• Nobel Prize
  • Horst L. Störmer, Daniel C. Tsui
  • Chemistry – Walter Kohn, John Pople
  • Louis J. Ignarro, Ferid Murad
• Turing Award: Jim Gray
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Karl Karekin Turekian

Deaths

• March 13 – Hans von Ohain (b. 1911), German aeronautical engineer.
• March 15 –
  pediatrician
  .
• March 16 – Sir
  Nobel laureate
  .
• May 9 –
  palaeontologist
  .
• May 14 – Marjory Stoneman Douglas (b. 1890), American conservationist.
• May 22 – José Enrique Moyal (b. 1910), Jerusalem-born mathematical physicist.
• May 31 – Michio Suzuki (b. 1926), Japanese mathematician.
• July 3 – Danielle Bunten Berry, also known as Dan Bunten (b. 1949), American software developer.
• July 12 –
  Candidate of Technical Sciences, Docent, laureate of the Lenin and state prizes
  .
• July 14 – Miroslav Holub (b. 1923), Czech immunologist and poet.
• July 21 – Alan Shepard (b. 1923), American astronaut.
• August 4 –
  Yury Artyukhin (b. 1930), Soviet Russian cosmonaut
  .
• August 26 – Frederick Reines (b. 1918), American physicist, Nobel laureate.^[18]
• October 10 – Konstantin Petrzhak (b. 1907), Soviet Russian physicist.
• October 28 – Tommy Flowers (b. 1905), English computer engineer.
• November 12 – Sally Shlaer (b. 1938), US mathematician and engineer
• November 24 – Nicholas Kurti (b. 1908), Hungarian-born physicist.
• December 5 – Hazel Bishop (b. 1906), American cosmetic chemist.
• December 7 – Martin Rodbell (b. 1925), American biochemist and molecular endocrinologist, Nobel laureate.
• December 17 –
  neurologist
  (murdered).
• December 18 – Lev Dyomin (b. 1926), Soviet Russian cosmonaut.
• December 20 –
  physiologist
  , Nobel laureate.
• December 28 –
  Robert Rosen (b. 1934
  ), American theoretical biologist.