1982 in science

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The year 1982 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• January 17 – Allan Hills A81005, the first lunar meteorite found on Earth, is discovered in the Allan Hills at the end of the Transantarctic Mountains by John Schutt and Ian Whillans during the ANSMET meteorite gathering expedition. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}
• March 10 – Syzygy: all 9 planets align on the same side of the Sun.
• October 14 – Halley's Comet: First spotted in the sky after 70 year return.

Biology

• September – First report of anti-human monoclonal antibody production. ^{[5] [6] [7]}

Computer science

• January 7 – The Commodore 64 8-bit home computer is launched by Commodore International (released in August); it becomes the all-time best-selling single personal computer model. ^[8]
• January 30 – First computer virus, the Elk Cloner, written by 15-year-old Rich Skrenta, is found in the wild. ^[9] It infects Apple II computers via floppy disk.
• July 9 – Sci-fi movie Tron is the first feature film to use computer animation extensively.

Earth sciences

• December 13 – 1982 North Yemen earthquake, the first instrumentally recorded event to be detected on global seismograph networks.

History of science

• Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist is published by Russell McCormmach. McCormmach uses the novel to present a historiographic point meant to reinforce Thomas Kuhn's conception of a non-linear scientific development.

Mathematics

• Michael Freedman proves the Poincaré conjecture in dimensions equal to 4. ^[10]
• Gerhard Frey draws attention to the property of the elliptic curve which becomes known as the Frey curve. ^[11]
• Brazilian mathematician Celso Costa gives a mathematical description of Costa's minimal surface, the first embedded minimal surface discovered in more than a century. ^[12]
• Alexander Merkurjev and Andrei Suslin prove the norm residue isomorphism theorem in Milnor K2-theory for the case n = 2 and ℓ arbitrary, with applications to the Brauer group.

Medicine

• July 20 – Allen Hill and colleagues at the University of Oxford develop a glucose biosensor. ^{[13] [14]}
• September 9 – George Brownlee and colleagues at the University of Oxford publish their results of cloning human clotting factor IX. ^[15]
• November – Helen House, the world’s first children’s hospice, is set up by Sister Frances Dominica in Oxford, England. ^[16]
• December 2 – At the University of Utah, 61-year-old retired dentist Barney Clark becomes the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart; he lives for 112 days with the device.
• Janet Balaskas establishes and names the active birth movement. ^[17]
• Working Formulation adopted as a standard classification for non-Hodgkin lymphomas.
• Atomic Energy of Canada creates Therac-25, a radiation treatment for cancer patients to remove tumors; however the treatment causes 6 deaths between 1985-87 after people are seriously burned by the number of rads: the correct dose of rads is 200-1,000 rads but Therac-25 has 15,000-20,000 rads which is fatal. It is no longer used after 1987.

Physics

• The Sakuma–Hattori equation is first proposed by Fumihiro Sakuma, Akira Ono and Susumu Hattori.

Psychology

• The Foundations of Ethology is published by Konrad Lorenz.

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Alain Connes, William Thurston and Shing-Tung Yau
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Kenneth G. Wilson
  • Chemistry – Aaron Klug
  • Medicine – Sune K. Bergström, Bengt I. Samuelsson, John R. Vane
• Turing Award – Stephen Cook

Deaths

• February 20 – Derek Jackson (b. 1906), British-born spectroscopist and steeplechase rider.
• March 25 – Rufus P. Turner (b. 1907), African American electronic engineer.
• April 9 – Robert Havemann (b. 1910), German chemist.
• May 3 – Henri Tajfel (b. 1919), Polish-born British social psychologist.
• May 22 – Jay Laurence Lush (b. 1896), American livestock geneticist.
• June 12 – Karl von Frisch (b. 1886), Austrian-born ethologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• July 29 – Vladimir K. Zworykin (b. 1889), Russian American pioneer of television technology.
• August 5 – John Charnley (b. 1911), English orthopaedic surgeon.
• December 27 – Jack Swigert (b. 1931), American astronaut.

References

1. "Allan Hills A81005". Meteoritical Society. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
2. Marvin, Ursula B. (1983-01-01). "The discovery and initial characterization of Allan Hills 81005: The first lunar meteorite". Geophysical Research Letters . 10 (9): 775–778. Bibcode:1983GeoRL..10..775M. doi:10.1029/GL010i009p00775.
3. Righter, Kevin; Gruener, John. "Allan Hills A81005" (PDF). NASA. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
4. Righter, Kevin; Gruener, John. "The Lunar Meteorite Compendium". NASA. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
5. Greener, Mark (2005). "MAbs Turn 30". The Scientist. 19 (3): 14–16.
6. Tseng, S.C.; Jarvinen, M.J.; Nelson, W.G.; Huang, J.W.; Woodcock-Mitchell, J.; Sun, T.T. (1982). "Correlation of specific keratins with different types of epithelial differentiation: monoclonal antibody studies". Cell. 30 (2): 361–372. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(82)90234-3. PMID   6183000. S2CID   18786728.
7. Woodcock-Mitchell, J.; Eichner, R.; Nelson, W.G.; Sun, T.T. (1982). "Immunolocalization of keratin polypeptides in human epidermis using monoclonal antibodies". Journal of Cell Biology. 95 (2): 256–269. doi:10.1083/jcb.95.2.580. PMC   2112943 . PMID   6183275.
8. "How many Commodore 64 computers were sold?". pagetable. Archived from the original on 2016-03-06. Retrieved 2013-03-25.
9. "Elk Cloner". SearchSecurity. June 2004. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
10. Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 93. ISBN   978-1-84724-008-8.
11. Frey, Gerhard (1982). "Rationale Punkte auf Fermatkurven und getwisteten Modulkurven". Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik . 331: 185–191.
12. Costa, Celso (1982). Imersões mínimas completas em ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}}$ de gênero um e curvatura total finita. Ph.D. Thesis, IMPA, Rio de Janeiro.
13. Cass, A. E. G.; et al. (1985). "Ferrocene-mediated enzyme electrode for amperometric determination of glucose". Analytical Chemistry . 56 (4): 667–71. doi:10.1021/ac00268a018. PMID   6721151.
14. "RSC honours Oxford University team behind diabetic breakthrough". Royal Society of Chemistry. 2012-07-16. Retrieved 2014-10-10.
15. Choo, K. H.; Gould, K. G.; Rees, D. J. G.; Brownlee, G. G. (1982). "Molecular cloning of the gene for human anti-haemophilic factor IX". Nature . 299 (5879): 178–180. Bibcode:1982Natur.299..178C. doi:10.1038/299178a0. PMID   6287289. S2CID   1298041.
16. Midgley, Emma (2009-09-09). "The story of Helen House". BBC Berkshire . Retrieved 2013-09-07.
17. Balaskas, Janet (1983). Active Birth. London: Unwin. ISBN   0-04-612033-5.