1985 in science

• January 7 – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.

• The fullerene Buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀) is first intentionally prepared by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in the United States.{{cite journal|year=1985|title=C₆₀: Buckminsterfullerene|journal=Nature|volume=318|pages=162–163|doi=10.1038/318162a0|issue=6042|bibcode=1985Natur.318..162K|last1=Kroto|first1=H. W.|last2=Heath|first2=J. R.|last3=O'Brien|first3=S. C.|last4=Curl|first4=R. F.|last5=Smalley|first5=R. E.|s2cid=4314237 }}

• March – The GNU Manifesto, written by Richard Stallman, is first published.
• March 15 – The first commercial Internet domain name, in the top-level domain .com, is registered in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• November 20 – Microsoft Windows operating system released.

• May 16 – Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey announce discovery of the ozone hole.{{cite book|title=Penguin Pocket On This Day|publisher=Penguin Reference Library|isbn=978-0-14-102715-9|year=2006}}{{cite journal|title=Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClO_x/NO_x interaction|pages=207–10|author=Farman, J. C.|author-link=Joe Farman|author2=Gardiner, B. G.|author2-link=Brian G. Gardiner (meteorologist)|author3=Shanklin, J. D.|author3-link=Jon Shanklin|journal=Nature|year=1985|doi=10.1038/315207a0|volume=315|issue=6016|bibcode=1985Natur.315..207F|s2cid=4346468 }}{{cite journal|doi=10.1111/j.1533-8525.1994.tb00419.x|first=Stephen C.|last=Zehr|title=Accounting for the Ozone Hole: Scientific Representations of an Anomaly and Prior Incorrect Claims in Public Settings|journal=The Sociological Quarterly|volume=35|issue=4|pages=603–19|year=1994|jstor=4121521}}

• September 1 – The wreck of the RMS Titanic (1912) in the North Atlantic is located by a joint American-French expedition led by Dr. Robert Ballard (WHOI) and Jean-Louis Michel (Ifremer) using side-scan sonar from RV Knorr.{{cite magazine|title=Sept. 2, 1985: Hey, Everyone, We Found the Titanic|first=Randy|last=Alfred|url=https://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/09/dayintech_0902|date=2008-02-09|accessdate=2011-11-03|magazine=Wired}}{{cite journal|title=How We Found the Titanic|first=Robert D.|last=Ballard|journal=National Geographic |volume=168|issue=6|pages=696–718 |date=December 1985}}

• March – Louis de Branges de Bourcia publishes proof of de Branges's theorem.{{cite journal|last=de Branges|first=Louis|title=A proof of the Bieberbach conjecture|doi=10.1007/BF02392821|mr=772434|year=1985|journal=Acta Mathematica|volume=154|issue=1|pages=137–152|doi-access=free}}
• September – Dennis Sullivan publishes proof of the No wandering domain theorem.{{cite journal|first=Dennis|last=Sullivan|s2cid=54186648|title=Quasiconformal homeomorphisms and dynamics I. Solution of the Fatou-Julia problem on wandering domains|journal=Annals of Mathematics|jstor=1971308|volume=122|year=1985|issue=2|pages=401–418|doi=10.2307/1971308 }}
• December – Publication of the ATLAS of Finite Groups.
• Jean-Pierre Serre provides partial proof that a Frey curve cannot be modular, showing that a proof of the semistable case of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture would imply Fermat's Last Theorem.
• Leonard Adleman, Roger Heath-Brown and Étienne Fouvry prove that the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem holds for infinitely many odd primes p.{{cite journal|author1=Adleman L. M. |author2=Heath-Brown, D. R. |date=June 1985|title=The first case of Fermat's last theorem|journal= Inventiones Mathematicae|volume=79|issue=2|pages=409–416|publisher=Springer|location=Berlin|doi=10.1007/BF01388981|bibcode = 1985InMat..79..409A |s2cid=122537472 }}

• September – Physicist Carl Sagan's hard science fiction novel Contact is published in the United States, introducing the concept of a traversable wormhole devised by Kip Thorne.{{cite web|url=http://contact-themovie.warnerbros.com/cmp/technology.html|title=Contact – High Technology Lends a Hand/Science of the Soundstage|publisher=Warner Bros.|access-date=2014-09-01|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010304211755/http://contact-themovie.warnerbros.com/cmp/technology.html|archive-date=2001-03-04}}
• Portugal joins CERN.

• February 19 – Artificial heart patient William J. Schroeder becomes the first such patient to leave hospital.
• March 4 – The United States Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS infection, used since this date for testing all U.S. blood donations.
• March–May – Joshua Silver develops an adjustable corrective lens.
• September 12 – German surgeon Erich Mühe performs the first laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
• October 17 – The British House of Lords decides the legal case of Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority[http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1985/7.html [1985] 3 All ER 402] (HL). which sets the significant precedent of Gillick competence, i.e. that a child of 16 or under may be competent to consent to contraception or – by extension – other medical treatment without requiring parental permission or knowledge.
• Publication of a classified bibliography of 3500 reports on controlled trials in perinatal medicine published since 1940.{{cite web|title=About the Cochrane Library|url=http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/view/0/AboutTheCochraneLibrary.html#ABOUT|publisher=The Cochrane Library|accessdate=2011-01-25|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110105124021/http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/view/0/AboutTheCochraneLibrary.html#ABOUT|archivedate=2011-01-05|url-status=dead}}
• DNA is first used in a criminal case.{{cite book|last=Gaines|first=Larry|author2=Miller, LeRoy|title=Criminal Justice In Action: The Core|year=2006|publisher=Thomson/Wadsworth|isbn=978-0-495-00305-2}}
• New York-based neurologist Oliver Sacks publishes The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.

• January 1 – The first British mobile phone calls are made.{{cite news|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4138449.stm|title=Mobiles rack up 20 years of use|work=BBC News|accessdate=2008-01-29|date=2005-01-01}}{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30430475|title=UK's first mobile phone user remembers his call 30 years on|work=BBC News|accessdate=2005-01-01|date=2005-01-01}}
• February 20 – Minolta releases the Maxxum 7000, the world's first autofocus single-lens reflex camera.
• Atomic force microscope invented by Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate and Christopher Berger.{{cite journal|author1=Binnig, G. |author2=Quate, C. F. |author3=Berger, Ch. |title=Atomic Force Microscope|journal=Physical Review Letters|volume=56|issue=9|pages=930–933|date=1986-03-03|bibcode=1986PhRvL..56..930B|doi = 10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.930|pmid=10033323|doi-access=free}}
• Akira Yoshino develops a practical lithium-ion battery.

• Nobel Prizes
• Physics – Klaus von Klitzing – for his discovery of the quantization of electrical resistance
• Chemistry – Herbert A. Hauptman, Jerome Karle
• Medicine – Michael S. Brown, Joseph L. Goldstein
• Turing Award – Richard Karp – for his work on computational complexity theory

• August 26 – Hugo Duminil-Copin, French mathematician.{{cite web|first=Jordana|last=Cepelewicz|title=Hugo Duminil-Copin Wins the Fields Medal|work=Quanta Magazine|date=2022-07-05|url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/hugo-duminil-copin-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/|access-date=2022-07-05|archive-date=2022-07-05|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220705073201/https://www.quantamagazine.org/hugo-duminil-copin-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/|url-status=live}}
• John M. Jumper, American computer scientist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

• March 10 – C. B. van Niel (b. 1897), Dutch American microbiologist.
• April 20 – Charles Richter (b. 1900), American geophysicist and inventor.
• July 20 – Bruno de Finetti (b. 1906), Italian statistician.
• August 5 – Arnold Wilkins (b. 1907), English pioneer of radar.
• August 31 – Frank Macfarlane Burnet (b. 1899), Australian virologist best known for his contributions to immunology, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 6 – Rodney Porter (b. 1917), English biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 7 – George Pólya (b. 1887), Hungarian mathematician.
• September 10 – Ernst Öpik (b. 1893), Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist.
• October 22 – Thomas Townsend Brown (b. 1905), American inventor.
• November 24 – László Bíró (b. 1899), Hungarian inventor.
• December 21 – Elliott Organick (b. 1925), American computer scientist and educator
• c. December 26 – Dian Fossey (b. 1932), American primatologist (murdered).

{{reflist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:1985 In Science}}

Category:20th century in science

Category:1980s in science