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2008
Events and discoveries
January 15 – NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes the first of its three flybys of Mercury at an altitude of 200 kilometres (120 mi), decreasing its velocity for its 2011 orbital insertion.
February 7 – An annular solar eclipse takes place.
March 12 – The Cassini spacecraft orbits within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of Enceladus, its closest encounter yet with the sixth-largest moon of Saturn.
April 2 – A hybrid human-cow embryo survives a third straight day after being fertilized at Newcastle University, England. A director for embryonic stem cell laboratories at the Australian Stem Cell Centre says that the "99-per-cent human" embryo could improve research within the field of human diseases. However, the Catholic Church states that the creation is "monstrous", and says that the later destruction of it is unethical.[1]
June – Spanish surgeon Paolo Macchiarini carries out the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant, replacing a Colombian woman's windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells.[2]
June 8 – NASA's Pluto probe New Horizons crosses the orbit of Saturn, after a journey of over two years.
August 1 – A total solar eclipse takes place in northern Canada, Siberia, Mongolia and northern China.
September 10 – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN begins proton beam tests.
September 19 – A magnet in the LHC fails, damaging several other magnets and requiring substantial repairs.
October 6 – NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes the second of its three flybys of Mercury.
October 7 – 2008 TC3 becomes the first Earth-impacting meteoroid spotted and tracked prior to impact.
November 10 – The Martin Jetpack flies for 46 seconds, 13 seconds longer than any previous jetpack.[3]
Deaths
March 19 – Arthur C. Clarke (b. 1917), science fiction author and inventor.
April 8 – Graham Higman (b. 1917), mathematician.
April 16 – Edward Norton Lorenz (b. 1917), mathematician and meteorologist, coined the term butterfly effect.
April 29 – Albert Hofmann (b. 1906), chemist, synthesizer of LSD.
May 15 – Willis Lamb (b. 1913), physicist, winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics.
August 5 – Neil Bartlett (b. 1932), chemist who prepared the first compound of a noble gas
12 February 2008 Death of Boris Valerianovich Chirikov
2 March 2008 Death of Frederick Seitz
13 April 2008 Death of John Archibald Wheeler
Physics Nobel Prize:
Yoichiro Nambu
"for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics"
Makoto Kobayashi , Toshihide Maskawa
"for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"
Source: Wikipedia, : All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
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