1959 In Science

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1959 In Science

The year 1959 in Science and Technology involved some significant events, listed below.

ASTRONOMY AND SPACE EXPLORATION

August 7 - The United States launches Explorer 6 from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral , Florida .

September 15 - Russia n probe Luna 2 sends back first photos of the far side of Earth 's Moon .

September 19 - Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison publish in Nature their seminal paper ''Searching for Interstellar Communications'', establishing the scientific rationale for SETI .

Physicist Freeman Dyson first proposes the hypothetical Dyson Sphere .

Little Joe 2 , a mission in the Mercury Program , carried Sam The Monkey into space.

BIOLOGY

January 1 - Cultivar s of Plant s named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin.

July - The medical research group studying Minamata Disease comes to the conclusion that Mercury is the cause. {Link without Title}

COMPUTER SCIENCE

IBM shipped the Transistor -based IBM 1401 mainframe.

PHYSICS

The Neutrino is first experimentally detected, by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines .

Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predict the Aharonov-Bohm Effect .

TECHNOLOGY

Agfa introduces the first fully automatic Camera , the ''Optima''.

Eveready Battery engineer Lewis Urry invents the long-lasting Alkaline Battery .

Pilkington Brothers Patent the Float Glass Process .

AWARDS

Nobel Prize s

--- Physics - Emilio Gino Segrè , - Owen Chamberlain

--- Chemistry - Jaroslav Heyrovský

--- Medicine - Severo Ochoa , Arthur Kornberg

BIRTHS

Russell Foley

Henk-Jan Van Tuyl

December 25 - Michael P. Anderson (d. 2003 ), American Astronaut .

DEATHS