1960 in science in Encyclopedia

1960 in science

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1960 in science

The year 1960 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

March 14 - Jodrell Bank Observatory in England makes radio contact with the U.S. Pioneer 5 probe over a distance of 407,000 miles (655,000 km).^[1]
April–July - Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake begins searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with Project Ozma at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia.
April 13 - The United States launches navigation satellite Transit I-b.
May 15 - Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 4 into Earth orbit.
June 3 - British-born American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposes the idea of Dyson spheres.^[2]
August 12 - First experimental Project Echo passive communications satellite goes into orbit.^[3]
August 19 - Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 5 with the dogs Belka and Strelka, forty mice, two rats and a variety of plants. The spacecraft will return to earth the next day and all animals will be recovered safely.
Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal invents the artificial language Lincos, intended for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.

February 13
- Max Perutz publishes the structure of hemoglobin.^[4]
- John Kendrew publishes the structure of myoglobin.^[5]
July - Robert Burns Woodward publishes a total synthesis of chlorophyl.^[6]
Jacques Ruffi invents hemotyping.
Juan Oro finds that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide adenine.
Four independent researchers (Sam Weiss, Jerard Hurwitz, Audrey Stevens and J. Bonner) discover the bacterial RNA polymerase that regulates the polymerization of nucleotides under the control of DNA.^[7]
Climatron geodesic dome greenhouse opens at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.^[8]

May 22 - Valdivia earthquake: Chile's subduction fault ruptures from Talcahuano to the Taitao Peninsula (with its epicenter near Lumaco), causing the most powerful earthquake on record (with a magnitude of 9.5) and a tsunami.

January 23 - Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reach bottom in the Mariana Trench in United States Navy bathyscaphe Trieste at a depth of 10,916 m.
May 10 - The nuclear submarine USS Triton, under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., completes the first underwater circumnavigation of the Earth.

Wac aw Sierpi ski proves the existence of Sierpinski numbers.
In the classification of finite simple groups, Michio Suzuki and Rimhak Ree introduce Suzuki Ree groups;^[10]^[11] and John G. Thompson, Walter Feit and Marshall Hall prove that a group with a fixed-point-free automorphism of prime order is nilpotent, and that all finite simple CN groups of odd order are cyclic.^[12]

April 15 - William C. Chardack implants the first fixed-rate cardiac pacemaker with mercury battery, designed by Wilson Greatbatch.^[13]
May 9 - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces that it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle's Enovid, making it the world's first approved combined oral contraceptive pill.
June 6 - The American Heart Association announces a strong statistical association between heavy cigarette smoking and coronary heart disease.^[14]