November 30

Sweyn’s son became king of all England when Edmund Ironside died, then of Denmark and, in 1028, of Norway. England paid his army off in 1018 with 82,500 pounds, the largest geld of all. He ruled as a Christian king, married Æthelred’s widow Emma, and went on pilgrimage to Rome.

Grinding his own lenses, Galileo went from a three-power spyglass to one of about twenty powers in a few months. Over the next weeks he watched sunlight catch peaks inside the Moon’s shadow and, from their distance past the line of light, reckoned the Moon’s mountains at some four miles high.

Washington wanted the escaped enslaved returned; the British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, refused and instead had about 3,000 names recorded, of Black Loyalists leaving New York for Nova Scotia and elsewhere. One was Harry Washington, who had escaped from Mount Vernon.

Spain’s Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition kept cowpox alive across the Atlantic in 22 orphan boys, vaccinated two at a time, arm to arm. Isabel Zendal, rectora of the A Coruña orphanage, sailed to care for them. Francisco Javier de Balmis crossed the Pacific with 26 Mexican boys to Manila,…

Captain Russell Elliott of HMS Fly drew up rules for the island of the Bounty mutineers’ descendants: a magistrate elected each year by every islander born there, male or female, aged eighteen or over. A first, but for a community of about a hundred people, and not a country.

Hood, now invading Tennessee, sent his army across two miles of open ground at Union earthworks. In five hours he lost 6,261 men (NPS) and six generals killed, Patrick Cleburne among them.

Riders took trains, fans spread nails and beat up rivals, and the cycling federation struck out the first four finishers, Garin among them. Fifth-placed Henri Cornet, aged 19, is still the youngest winner.

He had found the Entwurf equations wrong, and David Hilbert in Göttingen, who had heard him lecture there that summer, was closing in on the same problem. So Einstein took a paper to the Prussian Academy every Thursday for four weeks, eating little and sleeping less.

The Nazis hung confiscated modern art in cramped rooms with mocking slogans, across the Hofgarten from Munich’s official show of “German art”. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that more than 2 million people saw it in 1937. More than 20,000 works were seized from German museums that…

Thousands of workers, many of them soldiers and reservists, raised a concrete and steel shell over the ruin, working in short shifts to limit their doses. Much of the work was done by remote control, because no one could stay long enough to weld or bolt it by hand.

The “Shelter Object” enclosed about 200 tonnes of highly radioactive material. It was built fast, with seams no one could fully seal, and designed to last twenty to thirty years.

Twelve teams in China, playing 80-minute matches. The United States beat Norway 2–1 in the final in Guangzhou. FIFA called it a World Championship for Women’s Football; the name World Cup came later.

A rivalry between Sean Combs’s Bad Boy Records in New York and Suge Knight’s Death Row in Los Angeles, and their stars the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, played out on records, at awards shows and in the rap press. It ended with both men shot dead within six months; neither killing has been…

Tupac was shot five times and robbed in the lobby of a Times Square studio building, where the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs were recording upstairs. He survived, blamed the two of them, and they denied any part in it. The accusation began the feud.

In the biennial blind test of protein-structure prediction, DeepMind’s system predicted the shapes of proteins from their amino-acid sequences with a median score of 92.4 out of 100, close to experimental accuracy — a problem open for fifty years.

At the CASP14 competition, DeepMind's system predicted the shape of proteins from their amino-acid sequences about as accurately as lab experiments — a problem open for 50 years. DeepMind later published predicted structures for over 200 million proteins, nearly every one known.

A research preview that reached a million users in five days and made conversational AI something people used, not just read about.

OpenAI released a chat interface to one of its language models as a free research preview. It passed a million users in five days, and within months rival chatbots from the large technology companies followed.