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/or inventions:
“Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces—in the beginning, there was spice.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“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)