1975 in science

The year 1975 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• April 19 - Aryabhata, India's first satellite, is launched using Soviet boosters.
• July 17 - Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock with each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
• August 20 - Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.

Biology

• August 7 - César Milstein and Georges Köhler report their discovery of how to use hybridoma cells to isolate monoclonal antibodies, effectively beginning the history of monoclonal antibody use in science.^[1][2]
• Living specimens of the Chacoan Peccary (Catagonus wagneri), previously known to scientists only from fossils, are identified in Paraguay.^[3]

Climatology

• August 8 - The term global warming is probably first used in its modern sense by Wallace Smith Broecker.^[4][5][6]

Computer science

• January - Altair 8800 is released, sparking the era of the microcomputer.
• March 5 - hackers in Silicon Valley hold the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
• April 4 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen form a company at this time called Micro Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to develop and sell BASIC interpreter software for the Altair 8800.

Mathematics

• Benoit Mandelbrot coins the term fractal.
• Harada–Norton group discovered.^[7][8]

Medicine

• Mini–mental state examination (MMSE) or Folstein test introduced to screen for dementia or other cognitive dysfunction.^[9]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Aage Bohr, Ben Roy Mottelson, James Rainwater
  • Chemistry - John Warcup Cornforth, Vladimir Prelog
  • Medicine - David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco, Howard Martin Temin
• Turing Award - Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon

Births

• July 17 - Terence Tao, Australian-born mathematician.

Deaths

• February 14 - Sir Julian Huxley (b. 1887), English biologist and author.
• May 14 - Ernst Alexanderson (b. 1878), Swedish American television pioneer.
• June 27 - Sir Geoffrey Taylor (b. 1886), English physicist.

References

1. ^ Kohler, G.; Milstein, C. (1975). "Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity". Nature 256 (5517): 495–497. Bibcode 1975Natur.256..495K. doi:10.1038/256495a0. PMID 1172191. 
2. ^ Waldman, Thomas A. (2003). "Immunotherapy: past, present and future" (PDF). Nature Medicine 9 (3): 269–277. doi:10.1038/nm0303-269. PMID 12612576. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nm/journal/v9/n3/full/nm0303-269.html&filetype=pdf. Retrieved 10 March 2005. 
3. ^ Naish, Darren (2008-11-24). "New, obscure, and nearly extinct rodents of South America, and... when fossils come alive". Tetrapod Zoology. Archived from the original on 16 December 2008. http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology. Retrieved 2008-12-13. 
4. ^ Broecker, Wallace S. (1975-08-08). "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?". Science 189: 460–463. doi:10.1126/science.189.4201.460. 
5. ^ Stefan (2010-07-28). "Happy 35th birthday, global warming!". RealClimate. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/happy-35th-birthday-global-warming/. Retrieved 2012-01-28. "[Broecker's article is] the first of over 10,000 papers for this search term according to the ISI database of journal articles" 
6. ^ Johnson, Brad (2010-08-03). "Wally's World". Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/03/wallys_world. Retrieved 2012-01-28. 
7. ^ Harada, Koichiro (1976). "On the simple group F of order ". Proceedings of the Conference on Finite Groups (Univ. Utah, Park City, Utah, 1975). Boston, MA: Academic Press. pp. 119–276. MR 0401904. 
8. ^ Norton, Simon P. (1975). F and other simple groups. University of Cambridge: PhD Thesis. 
9. ^ Folstein, Marshal F.; Folstein, Susan E.; McHugh Paul R. (November 1975). ""Mini-mental state": A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician". Journal of Psychiatric Research 12 (3): 189–98. doi:10.1016/0022-3956(75)90026-6. PMID 1202204. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6T8T-460XFH9-7V-1&_cdi=5095&_user=126524&_pii=0022395675900266&_origin=&_coverDate=11%2F30%2F1975&_sk=999879996&view=c&wchp=dGLbVzW-zSkWb&md5=a4fb31d896c7860b2e0422088920f1fc&ie=/sdarticle.pdf. Retrieved 10 August 2011.