Timeline of United States discoveries

Timeline of United States discoveries encompasses the breakthroughs of human thought and knowledge of new scientific findings, phenomena, places, things, and what was previously unknown to exist.

With an emphasis of discoveries in the fields of astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine, biology, geology, paleontology, and archaeology, United States citizens acclaimed in their professions have contributed much.

For example, the "Bone Wars," beginning in 1877 and ending in 1892, was an intense period of rivalry between two American paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who initiated several expeditions throughout North America in the pursuit of discovering, identifying, and finding new species of dinosaur fossils.

[1] With the founding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, a vision and continued commitment by the United States of finding extraterrestrial and astronomical discoveries has helped the world to better understand the Solar System and universe.

As one example, in 2008, the Phoenix lander discovered the presence of frozen water on the planet Mars of which scientists such as Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) had suspected before the mission confirmed its existence.

The atoll consists of an extensive reef, two shallow lagoons, and some 50 sand and reef-rock islets and bars covered with lush, tropical vegetation.

Hiatt would eventually sell the rights to this type of apple to the Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards who renamed it the Red Delicious.

The ancient ruins of Cliff Palace were co-discovered during a snowstorm in December 1888 by Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason who were searching for stray cattle on Chapin Mesa.

The American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh would later name the specimen Torosaurus latus, in recognition of the bull-like size of its skull and its large eyebrow horns.

The rock unit is a black shale, and crops out at a number of localities near the town of Field, British Columbia in the Yoho National Park.

The original Golden Delicious tree is thought to have been discovered by Anderson Mullins on a hill near Porter Creek in Clay County, West Virginia.

[44] 1931 Heavy hydrogen 1931 Cosmic radio waves 1932 Positrons 1932 Homeostasis 1933 Heavy water 1933 Polyvinylidene chloride 1936 Elliptical galaxies 1936 Muons 1936 Vitamin E 1936 Sodium thiopental 1937 Niacin 1937 Electron capture 1938 Fluropolymers 1938 Animal echolocation 1938 Carme 1938 Lysithea 1940 Plutonium 1942 Cyanoacrylate 1943 Streptomycin 1944 Americium 1944 Curium 1945 Promethium 1946 Cloud seeding 1948 Warfarin 1948 Miranda 1948 Serotonin 1948 Tetracycline 1949 Nereid 1949 Berkelium 1950 Californium 1951 Barium stars 1951 Ananke 1952 Polio vaccine 1952 Einsteinium 1952 Rapid eye movement 1953 DNA structure In 1953, based on X-ray diffraction images and the information that the bases were paired, James D. Watson along with Francis Crick co-discovered what is now widely accepted as the first accurate double-helix model of DNA structure.

[81] 1955 Mendelevium 1955 Antiproton '1956 Porous silicon 1956 Kaon 1956 Antineutron 1956 Neutrino 1956 Nucleic acid hybridization 1958 Van Allen radiation belt 1959 Antiproton 1960 Seafloor spreading 1961 Eta meson 1964 Xi baryon 1964 Cosmic microwave background radiation 1964 Quark 1964 1930 Lucifer 1964 Hepatitis B virus 1965 Aspartame 1965 Pulsating white dwarfs 1968 Up quark 1968 Down quark 1969 Mosher's acid 1969 Interstellar formaldehyde 1970 Reverse transcriptase 1972 Opiate receptors 1974 Australopithecus "Lucy" Lucy is the common name of AL 288–1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of an individual Australopithecus afarensis.

While working in collaboration with a joint French-British-American team, Lucy was discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia on November 24, 1974, when American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, coaxed away from his paperwork by graduate student Tom Gray for a spur-of-the-moment survey, caught the glint of a white fossilized bone out of the corner of his eye, and recognized it as hominid.

[106] 1974 J/ψ mesons 1974 Charm quark 1974 Binary pulsars 1974 Leda 1974 Seaborgium 1975 1983 Bok 1975 Themisto 1975 Amarillo Starlight 1976 D mesons 1976 Hepatitis B virus vaccine 1977 Tau lepton 1977 Rings of Uranus The planet Uranus has a system of rings intermediate in complexity between the more extensive set around Saturn and the simpler systems around Jupiter and Neptune.

[115] 1977 Upsilon mesons 1977 Bottom quark 1978 Restriction endonucleases 1978 Charon 1979 Metis 1979 Thebe 1979 Rings of Jupiter 1980 Oncogene 1980 Pandora 1980 Prometheus 1980 Atlas 1981 Larissa 1983 Pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine 1984 Whydah wreckage First launched in 1715 from London, England, the Whydah was a three-masted ship of galley-style design measuring 105 feet (32 m) in length, rated at 300 tons burden, and could travel at speeds up to 14.95 mph (24.06 km/h).

It would then travel to the Caribbean to trade the slaves for precious metals, sugar, indigo, and medicinal ingredients, which would then be transported back to England.

Captained by the English pirate "Black Sam" Bellamy, the Whydah, on April 26, 1717, sailed into a violent storm dangerously close to Cape Cod and was eventually driven onto the shoals at Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Pummelled by 70-mile (110 km)-an-hour winds and 30 to 40-foot (12 m) waves, the main mast snapped, pulling the ship into some 30 feet (9.1 m) of water where she violently capsized, taking Bellamy, all but two of his 145 men, and over 4.5 tons of gold, silver and jewels with it.

After years of exhaustive searching, it was in 1984 that world headlines were made when American archeological explorer Barry Clifford found the only solidly-identified pirate shipwreck ever discovered, the Whydah.

After nearly 74 years of being lost at sea on the bottom of the ocean floor, a joint Franco-American expedition led by American oceanographer Dr. Robert D. Ballard, discovered the wreckage of the RMS Titanic two miles (3 km) beneath the waves of the North Atlantic on September 1, 1985.

In 1986, Ballard and his two-man crew, in the ALVIN submersible, made the first two-and-a-half-hour descent to the ocean floor to view the wreck first-hand.

It was discovered along with Nix in June 2005 by the Hubble Space Telescope's Pluto Companion Search Team, which is composed of Hal A. Weaver, Alan Stern, Max J. Mutchler, Andrew J. Steffl, Marc W. Buie, William J. Merline, John R. Spencer, Eliot F. Young, and Leslie A.

It was discovered along with Hydra in June 2005 by the Hubble Space Telescope's Pluto Companion Search Team, composed of Hal A. Weaver, Alan Stern, Max J. Mutchler, Andrew J. Steffl, Marc W. Buie, William J. Merline, John R. Spencer, Eliot F. Young, and Leslie A.