1972 in science

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The year 1972 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 5 – President of the United States Richard Nixon orders the development of a space shuttle program.
• February 4 – Mariner 9 sends pictures from Mars.
• February 21 – The Soviet unmanned spacecraft Luna 20 lands on the Moon.
• March 2 – Launch of Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
• April 16 – Apollo 16 launched.
• June 30 – The International Time Bureau adds the first leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
• July 23 – The United States launches Landsat 1, the first Earth-resources satellite.
• December 7 – Apollo 17 launched and 'The Blue Marble' photograph of the Earth taken.

Biology

• Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould publish their landmark paper on punctuated equilibrium
• Socorro doves (Zenaida graysoni) last seen in the wild. The species precariously survives in captivity. A reintroduction program is being prepared.

Computer science

• April 6 – Cray Research founded.^[1]
• May – Magnavox release the first home video game console which can be connected to a television set – the Magnavox Odyssey, invented by Ralph H. Baer.^[2]
• October – The First International Conference on Computer Communications is held in Washington, D.C. and hosts the first public demonstration of ARPAnet, a precursor of the Internet.
• November 29 – Atari release the production version of Pong, one of the first video games, devised by Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn.
• Write-only memory is devised as a joke in Signetics.^[3]

Ecology

• January – A Blueprint for Survival first published as a special edition of The Ecologist magazine in the United Kingdom.^[4]
• James Lovelock first refers to the Gaia hypothesis in print.^[5]

Food science

• Kadir Nurman invents the doner kebab in Berlin.^[6]

Mathematics

• Daniel Quillen formulates higher algebraic K-theory.
• Daniel Gorenstein announces a 16-step program for completing the classification of finite simple groups.^[7]
• Richard M. Karp shows that the Hamiltonian cycle problem is NP-complete.

Medicine

• January 31 – Immunosuppressive effect of ciclosporin discovered by a team at Sandoz, Basel, under Hartmann F. Stähelin.
• Archie Cochrane publishes Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services.

Paleontology

• Kielan-Jawarowska and Rinchen Barsbold report the associated remains of a Velociraptor and Protoceratops apparently killed and preserved while fighting.

Technology

• February 1 – The first scientific hand-held calculator (labeled Hewlett-Packard, later designated the HP-35) is introduced, at a price of $795.00.
• July 10 – Jack Cover files U.S. Patent 3,803,463 for the original form of Taser electroshock weapon.
• English inventor Peter Powell develops a steerable dual-line kite.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer
  • Chemistry – Christian B. Anfinsen, Stanford Moore, William H. Stein
  • Medicine – Gerald Edelman, Rodney R Porter
• Turing Award – Edsger Dijkstra

Births

• March 31 – Evan Williams, American Internet entrepreneur.
• April 5 – Nima Arkani-Hamed, Canadian-American theoretical physicist.
• June 21 – Warren Lyford DeLano, American bioinformatician and open source advocate (d. 2009).

Deaths

• May 8 – Beatrice Helen Worsley (b. 1921), Canadian computer scientist.
• August 25 – Lucien Bull (b. 1876), Irish-born French pioneer in chronophotography.
• October 1 – Louis Leakey (b. 1903), British paleoanthropologist.

References

1. "Cray Timeline" (PDF). Cray. Retrieved 2011-04-04.
2. Moore, Michael E.; Novak, Jeannie (2010). Game Industry Career Guide. Delmar: Cengage Learning. p. 7. ISBN 1-4283-7647-X. In 1966, Ralph H. Baer ... pitched an idea ... to create interactive games to be played on the television. Over the next two years, his team developed the first video game system—and in 1968, they demonstrated the "Brown Box," a device on which several games could be played and that used a light gun to shoot targets on the screen. After several more years of development, the system was licensed by Magnavox in 1970 and the first game console system, the Odyssey, was released in 1972 at the then high price of $100.
3. Pease, Bob. "The origin of the WOM – the "Write Only Memory"". National Semiconductor. Retrieved 2012-11-11.
4. "About The Ecologist". The Ecologist. Retrieved 2012-02-10.
5. Lovelock, J. E. (August 1972). "Gaia as seen through the atmosphere". Atmospheric Environment 6 (8): 579–580. doi:10.1016/0004-6981(72)90076-5. ISSN 0004-6981.
6. "Doner kebab 'inventor' Kadir Nurman dies in Berlin". BBC News. 26 October 2013. Retrieved 2013-10-27.
7. Gorenstein, D. (1979). "The classification of finite simple groups. I. Simple groups and local analysis". American Mathematical Society Bulletin, New Series 1 (1): 43–199. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1979-14551-8. ISSN 0002-9904. MR 513750. Appendix.