1990s in science and technology

This article is a summary of the 1990s in science and technology. 1990 April - The Hubble Space Telescope is launched; revolutionizes astronomy. September - The first successful somatic gene therapy trials begin. October - Human Genome Project formally begins. December 20 - The World Wide Web software is first tested by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. 1992 January 14 - The first intracytoplasmic sperm injection in vitro fertilization produced baby is born by mechanically injecting a single, selected sperm cell into an egg. Detection of extrasolar planets orbiting a pulsar is confirmed. 1994 The FlavrSavr tomato, the first genetically modified food sold in the United States is introduced. The Oriental Pearl Tower is completed in Shanghai, China, representing the newfound wealth and investment present in eastern China. 1995 The Global Positioning System (GPS) becomes fully operational. In April the NSFNET backbone is shut down, making the Internet a unified and "centerless" network without any restrictions on traffic types and essentially causing the Dot com bubble by attracting large-scale corporate investment in the Internet. On June 5 the first Bose–Einstein condensates of Rubidium-87 and Sodium-23 are created at JILA and MIT. In December the Galileo probe orbits Jupiter, studying the planet and its moons extensively. 1996 Dolly the sheep is cloned. Construction starts on the International Space Station. Google begins indexing the World Wide Web. 1997 April 1 - The Hale–Bopp comet swings past the Sun for the first time in 4,300 years and leads to the Heaven's Gate suicides. July 4 - NASA's spacecraft Pathfinder lands on Mars and deploys a small roving vehicle, Sojourner, which analyzes the planet's geology and atmosphere. Timeline of computing 1990–99 Some technologies invented and improved during the 1990s: December 1990 - The World Wide Web and its HTTP protocol and HTML language (a dialect of SGML until HTML5) are first successfully parsed by Tim Berners-Lee and eventually displace the Gopher protocol.