Events, Discoveries and Inventions
- 9 January – Apple Inc.'s first iPhone smartphone is announced by Steve Jobs at Macworld in San Francisco.
- 12 January – Comet McNaught reaches perihelion and becomes visible from Earth during daylight.
- 14 January – Scientists at the Roslin Institute announce they have genetically engineered chickens to lay eggs containing cancer-fighting proteins.
- 28 February – The New Horizons space probe makes a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter to change its trajectory towards Pluto.
- 3—4 March – A total lunar eclipse occurs, visible in some parts of the Americas and Asia, and in all of Europe and Africa.
- 19 March – A partial solar eclipse occurs, visible in Asia.
- 10 April – Spectroscopic analysis of HD 209458 b, an extrasolar planet, provides the first evidence of atmospheric water vapor beyond the Solar System.
- 24 April – The potentially habitable exoplanet Gliese 581 c is discovered in the constellation Libra.
- 27 April – US researchers simulate half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.
- 5 June – NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes its second flyby of Venus en route to Mercury.
- 28 August – A total lunar eclipse occurs, visible in some parts of the Americas and Asia, and all of Australasia and the Pacific Ocean.
- 11 September – A partial solar eclipse occurs, visible in southern areas of South America.
- 27 September – NASA's Dawn spacecraft is launched, beginning its journey to Vesta and Ceres.
- 24 October – Comet 17P/Holmes suddenly brightens from 17 to 2.8 magnitude.
Read more about this topic: 2007 In Science
Famous quotes containing the words discoveries and inventions, discoveries and/or inventions:
“It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)