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February 1, 2003

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster

Sixteen minutes from its runway, Columbia's final radio transmission cut off in mid-communication. The damage that killed the crew was sixteen days old.

Deorbit burn at 8:15:30

On 1 February 2003, commander Rick Husband and pilot William McCool fired Columbia's deorbit burn at 8:15:30 a.m. EST for a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center.

The orbiter reached its atmospheric entry interface over the Pacific at 8:44:09 a.m. Abnormal indications then developed in the left wing.

The final crew communication and telemetry ended at approximately 8:59:32 a.m., and ground video shows Columbia disintegrating at about 9:00:18 a.m. over Texas, roughly 16 minutes before its scheduled Florida touchdown.

Seven aboard STS-107

All seven crew members were killed: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon, the Israeli Space Agency's payload specialist and the first Israeli astronaut.

Columbia was on its 28th flight and the Shuttle program's 113th mission.

NASA and other organizations began searching for the crew and debris along the breakup path across Texas and Louisiana that day; the fleet was grounded, and NASA announced the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board the following day.

The breach opened on launch day

A piece of external-tank bipod-ramp foam had struck reinforced carbon-carbon panel 8 on Columbia's left-wing leading edge 81.7 seconds after the 16 January launch, with the vehicle at about 65,820 feet and Mach 2.46.

During reentry, superheated gas entered through that breach, melted and weakened internal aluminum structure, and led to loss of control, wing failure and breakup. This was not an explosion at a single instant: telemetry records a developing sequence of left-wing anomalies.

The investigation did not stop at the foam. It concluded that Shuttle-program management practices and organizational failures were causal as well.

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What the sources leave uncertain

NASA summaries variously round the loss to approximately 15 or 16 minutes before landing. The detailed chronology fixes the final telemetry and observed breakup more precisely; the date itself is not disputed.

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October 15, 2003

Shenzhou 5

Yang Liwei learned he was the one flying about 16 hours before launch. The public did not watch it live — CCTV waited until he was safely in orbit.

09:00 Beijing time at Jiuquan

A Long March 2F rocket lifted Shenzhou 5 and astronaut Yang Liwei from the Jiuquan launch center at 9:00 a.m. Beijing time — 01:00 UTC — on 15 October 2003.

The spacecraft separated from the rocket 587 seconds after liftoff and entered an elliptical orbit of 199.14 by 347.8 kilometres, inclined 42.4 degrees.

Yang, a 38-year-old former fighter pilot, had been picked from a three-person finalist group about 16 hours earlier and boarded roughly two hours and 45 minutes before liftoff.

Fourteen orbits and two flags

During the seventh orbit Yang displayed the Chinese and United Nations flags and greeted people around the world.

He completed 14 circuits of Earth. The reentry capsule landed in central Inner Mongolia at 6:23 a.m. on 16 October after 21 hours 23 minutes, a reported 4.8 kilometres from its target, and Yang came out under his own power in good condition.

He later recalled a 26-second vibration during ascent so violent that he thought he might die; subsequent Long March rockets were modified.

Third country, recorded footage

By putting Yang in orbit with a domestically launched spacecraft and rocket, China became the third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to achieve independent human-spaceflight capability. That phrase describes launching capability, not the third nationality ever to reach space.

CCTV did not carry the launch live. It announced success within minutes and broadcast recorded footage shortly afterward.

The launch is what this date marks; the landing that completed the mission came the next morning in Beijing time, and the orbital module stayed in space after the capsule returned.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The launch date and time are secure in both Beijing time and UTC.
Sources differ by several minutes on the landing time: the China Manned Space Engineering Office gives 06:23 Beijing time, while some secondary accounts give 06:28. This sheet follows the official mission chronology.
The official English CMSE page's claim that the orbital module remained aloft for 707 days conflicts with orbital catalogs that place its reentry on 30 May 2004.

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April 23, 2005

Me at the zoo

The first thing ever posted to YouTube is one unedited shot of a founder observing that elephants have long trunks, then saying that's pretty much all there is to say.

Nineteen seconds at the elephant exhibit

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo” on Saturday, 23 April 2005, under the account name “jawed.”

The clip shows him at the San Diego Zoo's elephant exhibit describing the elephants' long trunks. It runs 19 seconds in YouTube and Victoria and Albert Museum descriptions, though some YouTube retrospectives round it to 18.

Karim's high-school friend Yakov Lapitsky filmed it after Karim handed him a point-and-shoot camera at the exhibit.

Two dates for one upload

The historically documented upload time is 8:27 p.m. Pacific daylight time. Locally that was 23 April; in UTC it was already 24 April.

Current YouTube metadata exposes the date rather than that original local timestamp.

The site was still private or pre-public-beta when the clip went up; YouTube's own history places the wider beta in May 2005.

What the origin story does not settle

The founding anecdote is usually told as fact, and the founders disagreed about it. Karim associated the idea with difficulty finding Super Bowl and Indian Ocean tsunami footage, while Chad Hurley and Steve Chen gave a competing dinner-party account; contemporary reporting records the disagreement.

YouTube and the V&A identify all three — Karim, Hurley and Chen — as founders.

The title is capitalized “Me at the zoo,” and on that evening the clip's function was a test and demonstration of a still-obscure service.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The accepted date is 23 April in Pacific daylight time. The upload was late enough that its UTC date was 24 April.
The historically displayed description gave 8:27 p.m., but current YouTube metadata exposes the date rather than that original local timestamp.
Sources describe the runtime as either 18 or 19 seconds, apparently because of player and rounding conventions. The current standard description is 19 seconds.

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January 19, 2006

New Horizons

Forty-four minutes and 53 seconds after liftoff, a kick stage let go of a piano-sized spacecraft already moving fast enough to leave Earth behind.

Atlas V 551 at 19:00 UTC

An Atlas V 551 launched New Horizons from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, at 19:00 UTC — 2:00 p.m. EST — on 19 January 2006.

The spacecraft separated from its Star 48B solid-fuel kick stage 44 minutes 53 seconds after liftoff. Controllers received its first signals a little more than five minutes later through a Deep Space Network antenna at Canberra, confirming it was healthy.

That final boost put the 1,054-pound probe on an Earth-escape trajectory toward the outer Solar System at roughly 36,400 miles per hour relative to Earth.

What was on the rocket

New Horizons is a piano-sized, RTG-powered robotic probe carrying seven scientific instruments.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and controlled it, with Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute leading the science mission.

NASA had selected the mission in 2001, as the first project in its New Frontiers program, to carry out the first close reconnaissance of Pluto and Charon and to explore the Kuiper Belt.

Two things worth keeping straight

The corpus article filed under this date describes none of the launch; it consists entirely of later mission background.

Pluto was still officially the ninth planet on launch day — the IAU reclassified it as a dwarf planet in August 2006. And New Horizons had the highest Earth-relative launch velocity then achieved, which is not the same as staying the fastest-moving spacecraft by every measure.

NASA's contemporaneous launch release, mission catalog and archival chronology all give 19 January; a 2023 NASA article says 18 January in one sentence, an apparent page error rather than a real dispute.

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What the sources leave uncertain

NASA's contemporaneous launch release, mission catalog and archival chronology all give January 19. A 2023 NASA article says January 18 in one sentence; that is an apparent agency-page typo, not a genuine date dispute.

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February 22, 2006

2006 al-Askari mosque bombing

The explosions killed nobody inside the shrine. Within roughly 24 hours, police and military sources were reporting more than 130 deaths in the reprisals.

Police uniforms and charges under the dome

Attackers wearing Iraqi police-style uniforms infiltrated the al-Askari Shrine complex in Samarra overnight on 22 February 2006, restrained its guards, and planted explosives in and around the structure supporting the dome.

Two explosions around dawn brought down the shrine's gilded dome and damaged part of its northern wall. The blasts themselves killed no one, and substantial parts of the complex remained standing.

The details are less settled than they are usually told: contemporary reports placed the blasts at roughly 6:45 to 6:55 a.m., and accounts differ over whether four or seven attackers entered and whether five or nine guards were present.

Nobody claimed it that day

No organization claimed responsibility on 22 February. Iraqi officials immediately suspected Sunni extremists, and later Iraqi investigations and official U.S. military histories attributed the operation to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Those later reconstructions differ over who took part, and none of it was publicly established on the day of the bombing.

Iraqi and U.S. forces surrounded the shrine, searched nearby houses and detained security personnel.

What followed before nightfall

Within hours, mass demonstrations began and militants attacked Sunni mosques — the Associated Press reported at least eight the first day, six in Baghdad and two in Basra. About 500 soldiers were reported sent into Sunni Baghdad neighbourhoods.

Police and military sources reported more than 130 retaliatory deaths within roughly 24 hours. The much larger figures of 1,000 to 1,300 that circulate refer to several subsequent days and were themselves contested.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for seven days of mourning while instructing followers not to attack Sunni mosques, and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari called for calm. The dome that came down had been completed in 1905.

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What the sources leave uncertain

Contemporary reports placed the blasts at approximately 6:45–6:55 a.m.; the frequently repeated 6:44 a.m. is not consistent across sources.
Accounts differ over whether four or seven attackers entered and whether five or nine guards were present. Later U.S. Army and Iraqi-government reconstructions should not be presented as uncontested eyewitness facts.
No group claimed responsibility immediately. AQI attribution is strong in later official histories but was not established publicly on the day of the bombing.
Aftermath death counts vary greatly by geographic scope, reporting window and whether ordinary insurgency deaths were included.

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August 9, 2007

BNP Paribas

The bank did not say its assets had defaulted. It said trading had vanished so completely that it could no longer work out what they were worth.

Three funds, and not in London

On 9 August 2007 BNP Paribas Investment Partners announced that it had temporarily suspended calculation of net asset values, subscriptions and redemptions for three funds: Parvest Dynamic ABS, BNP Paribas ABS Euribor and BNP Paribas ABS Eonia.

The bank said a complete evaporation of liquidity in parts of the U.S. securitization market made it impossible to value the funds' underlying U.S. asset-backed securities fairly.

This was a French and Luxembourg fund-management action, not an event at a BNP Paribas operation in the United Kingdom. The funds were frozen rather than liquidated: the two French funds reopened on 28 August and the Luxembourg fund on 30 August.

€1.6 billion frozen, €94.8 billion supplied

The three funds held about €1.6 billion — roughly $2.2 billion — as reported on 7 August, the date from which the suspensions took effect at specified Paris and Luxembourg times.

As interbank stress intensified that same day, the European Central Bank supplied €94.8 billion overnight through a fine-tuning operation intended to pull the overnight interest rate back toward normal levels.

Contemporary reporting put roughly a third of the funds' money in subprime securities rated AA or higher; BNP later described them as only partially invested in such securities.

What 9 August was, and was not

BNP Paribas was not the first major institution to acknowledge subprime damage. HSBC, Bear Stearns, IKB and others had disclosed problems before August.

Some histories treat the day as the start of the global financial crisis; others as the point where existing subprime turmoil spread decisively into interbank funding markets. The Bank for International Settlements describes 9 August as the day turmoil reached those markets and a broader crisis emerged.

What the announcement demonstrated was narrower and stranger than a default: assets carrying high credit ratings had become impossible to price, a security able to look sound on paper while having no functioning market.

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What the sources leave uncertain

August 9 is the date BNP Paribas publicly announced the decision. Its release stated that the suspensions were effective from August 7 at specified Paris and Luxembourg times.
Some histories use August 9 as the start of the global financial crisis, while others treat it as the point when existing subprime turmoil spread decisively into interbank funding markets.

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July 10, 2008

App Store (Apple)

The store opened on desktop iTunes a day before most customers had the phone software needed to run anything they bought.

Live on iTunes, not yet on the phone

Apple made the App Store available through iTunes 7.7 on Mac and PC on 10 July 2008, letting customers browse and acquire native third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The built-in, on-device App Store came a day later, with the iPhone 2.0 software update and the iPhone 3G rollout on 11 July.

Purchases ran through an iTunes account; once a device was running iPhone 2.0, apps could be downloaded directly over cellular networks or Wi-Fi, and desktop purchases could be synchronized by USB.

More than 500 at launch, more than 800 by Monday

The launch catalog held more than 500 native applications from hundreds of companies, spanning games and business, news, sports, health, reference and travel software. More than 125 of them were free.

The familiar round number comes from Apple's own tenth-anniversary history, which uses exactly 500; the 10 July release said more than 500.

By 14 July Apple reported more than 10 million downloads over the first weekend, from a catalog that had grown past 800 applications, including more than 200 free ones.

What the date does not carry

Apple did not invent electronic software distribution or the general idea of an on-device software catalog. What is dated here is the opening of one curated marketplace.

Android Market did not launch alongside it that September either. Google announced details in August 2008, but Android Market and the T-Mobile G1 reached users on 22 October 2008.

The App Store's later economic and cultural weight is background rather than something that had already happened on launch day.

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What the sources leave uncertain

Apple's contemporaneous release precisely distinguishes the July 10 opening through iTunes 7.7 from the July 11 on-device availability through iPhone 2.0. Later Apple retrospectives consistently use July 10 as the App Store's launch date.
The title's '500 apps' is a rounded milestone. Apple's July 10 release said more than 500, while its tenth-anniversary history used exactly 500.

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October 21, 2008

Large Hadron Collider

CERN held the inauguration while the machine itself sat broken, warming toward room temperature so engineers could get at the damage.

A ceremony for a stopped collider

On 21 October 2008 at CERN near Geneva, Swiss president Pascal Couchepin, French prime minister François Fillon and science ministers from CERN member states and other countries formally inaugurated the Large Hadron Collider.

The machine was not running. A faulty electrical connection had caused mechanical damage and a major helium release on 19 September, and CERN had announced a minimum of two months' downtime.

The laboratory kept the scheduled date anyway; the ceremony recognized completion of the project after the first successful full-ring proton circulation on 10 September 2008.

Philip Glass, a buffet, and a second painted eye

The invitation-only ceremony featured speeches, exhibitions and “ORIGINS,” an audiovisual concert using Frans Lanting's images and Philip Glass's music, performed by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Carolyn Kuan.

Chef Ettore Bocchia presented a molecular-gastronomy buffet afterwards, and a separate LHCfest followed for 3,000 CERN personnel, where project leader Lyn Evans appeared as a backing dancer during the “LHC rap.”

A Japanese Daruma doll that had received one painted eye at the project's beginning was given its second eye to mark completion.

Nothing changed operationally that night

Director-general Robert Aymar framed the evening as recognition of the member states and the particle-physics community, and Evans declared the construction phase complete after more than two decades of planning, prototyping and construction on a 26,659-metre ring holding 9,593 magnets.

No particles collided. The damaged sector stayed warm and under repair, and the LHC did not record its first proton-proton collisions until 23 November 2009.

“At Geneva” is shorthand as well: the ceremony was held at CERN's site on the Franco-Swiss border near the city.

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January 20, 2009

First inauguration of Barack Obama

Two constitutional-law experts stumbled through a 35-word oath on the Capitol steps, then did it again the next evening out of an abundance of caution.

Noon, 28 degrees, one word out of order

On 20 January 2009, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administered the presidential oath to Barack Obama, who became the 44th president and the first African American to hold the office.

Roberts placed one word of the constitutionally prescribed oath out of sequence. White House counsel said the oath had been effective, and Roberts administered it again on 21 January “out of an abundance of caution.”

The term itself had begun at noon by constitutional operation, even though the outdoor ceremony ran late and the recital finished several minutes afterwards. It was 28°F at the Capitol at noon, with a northwest wind of 13 mph gusting to 23.

Biden first, Lincoln's Bible, 1.8 million people

Associate Justice John Paul Stevens administered the vice-presidential oath to Joseph R. Biden Jr. before Obama's, making Biden the 47th vice president.

Michelle Obama held the Bible used at Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration. Obama then delivered his inaugural address, which noted that his father, less than 60 years earlier, might not have been served in a local restaurant.

An official estimate put 1.8 million visitors on and around the National Mall.

What the first day actually contained

Obama proclaimed 20 January a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel circulated a memorandum directing executive agencies to pause or review pending regulations, subject to stated exceptions — a review-and-withdraw instruction, dated to the day but without any recorded time.

The executive orders on Guantánamo closure, military commissions and interrogation that get folded into Inauguration Day accounts were signed on 22 January.

Obama is conventionally numbered the 44th president though he was the 43rd individual to serve, because Grover Cleveland's nonconsecutive terms were numbered separately.

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What the sources leave uncertain

Obama’s constitutional term began at noon even though the outdoor ceremony was running late and the public oath finished several minutes afterward.
The first oath’s validity was not officially repudiated. White House counsel said it had been effective; the second oath was precautionary because one word had been out of sequence.
The 1.8-million attendance figure is an official estimate rather than a literal count.

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October 1, 2009

Ardipithecus ramidus

The discovery announced in 2009 had begun with a hand bone 15 years earlier, and the skeleton came out of the ground in 125 fragments.

Two press conferences, two continents

On 1 October 2009 an international team announced its reconstruction and analysis of the partial Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton ARA-VP-6/500 — nicknamed “Ardi” — at simultaneous press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa.

The announcement previewed 11 papers by 47 scientists from 10 countries in the 2 October issue of Science, covering the skeleton, other Ar. ramidus remains, geological dating, habitat, and associated animal and plant fossils.

They described a roughly 4.4-million-year-old individual, probably female, combining arboreal climbing adaptations with a more primitive form of terrestrial bipedalism than that of Australopithecus.

Fifteen years between the bone and the announcement

This was not the day the fossil was found. Yohannes Haile-Selassie found the hand bone that led the team to the skeleton in 1994, and excavation ran over three field seasons. The species was not new either: fragmentary Ar. ramidus fossils were first published in 1994 and the genus Ardipithecus was established in 1995.

The bones were so fragile that researchers molded them in place and lifted them in plaster jackets; Gen Suwa reconstructed the skull from 5,000 micro-CT slices.

The wider assemblage included 110 other catalogued Ar. ramidus specimens representing at least 36 individuals, plus more than 150,000 plant and animal fossils used to rebuild the woodland environment.

What the team claimed, and what it didn't

Ardi was presented as the oldest relatively complete hominin skeleton, not the oldest hominin remains. Older and far more fragmentary candidates — Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus kadabba — were already known.

The researchers argued that her anatomy undermined treating modern chimpanzees as unchanged models for the human–ape last common ancestor. Ardi was not identified as that ancestor, and Ar. ramidus's phylogenetic position and status as a direct human ancestor remain disputed.

Her sex is inferred rather than genetically demonstrated, some locomotor reconstructions are contested because the pelvis was crushed and incomplete, and the pair-bonding and male-provisioning ideas attached to the find were hypotheses C. Owen Lovejoy derived largely from canine anatomy.

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Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The 1 October date is solid for the press conferences and online unveiling; the print issue of Science is dated 2 October 2009.
Ardi’s sex is inferred, not genetically demonstrated.
The research team classified Ar. ramidus as a basal hominin and a possible ancestor or close relative of Australopithecus. Its exact phylogenetic position and status as a direct human ancestor remain disputed.
The team called Ardi the oldest known hominin skeleton, meaning a substantially represented skeleton—not the oldest hominin fossil remains. Older, much more fragmentary candidates such as Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, and Ardipithecus kadabba were already known.

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January 12, 2010

2010 Haiti earthquake

The earthquake wrecked the institutions that were supposed to organize the rescue. Ministries, hospitals and the UN mission headquarters were themselves disaster sites.

4:53 p.m., thirteen kilometres down

A moment-magnitude 7.0 earthquake ruptured at shallow depth near Léogâne at 4:53:10 p.m. local time on 12 January 2010. The current USGS solution puts it at 13 kilometres' depth with the epicentre 10 kilometres southeast of the town, at 18.443°N, 72.571°W.

The widely repeated time of 4:12 p.m. is wrong, and Port-au-Prince was not the epicentre; the capital lay east-northeast of the rupture and took catastrophic shaking.

Severe shaking devastated Port-au-Prince and communities including Léogâne, Carrefour and Jacmel, collapsing homes, hospitals, schools and government offices.

The responders were inside the collapsing buildings

The National Palace, the cathedral, the Ministry of Justice and numerous other government buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged, and water and electricity services almost entirely collapsed in the capital.

The Christopher Hotel, headquarters of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, collapsed with approximately 100 personnel believed to have been inside. Mission chief Hédi Annabi and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa were among those killed.

Thirty of the 49 hospitals in the affected area were damaged or destroyed, and by nightfall survivors were sleeping outdoors amid aftershocks, rubble, severed services and blocked roads.

Why no single death toll is defensible

The Haitian government reported an estimate of 222,570 deaths to the UN and later raised its figures above 300,000. A peer-reviewed household survey put deaths through 4 March 2010 at 158,679, with a 95% confidence interval of 136,813 to 180,545; another conservative estimate gave 65,575.

About 300,000 injuries were reported. The post-disaster assessment counted 105,369 houses destroyed and 208,164 damaged, and later analysis mapped 23,567 landslides triggered by the quake.

Counts of people described as homeless, displaced, affected or living in camps measure different populations and are not interchangeable. Magnitude alone does not account for the losses either: shallow rupture, vulnerable construction, dense urban settlement and the simultaneous destruction of response institutions all drove them.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The earthquake’s date, time, and magnitude are secure, but published epicentral distances and depths differ because preliminary and later USGS solutions used different locations. The current catalog gives 13 km depth and a point 10 km southeast of Léogâne; contemporary material often described it as roughly 15–25 km southwest of Port-au-Prince.
The death toll will probably never be known. Haitian government estimates ranged above 217,000 and were later raised above 300,000, while method-based studies produced substantially lower figures, including 158,679 with a stated confidence interval and another conservative estimate of 65,575.
Counts of people described as homeless, displaced, directly affected, or living in camps measure different populations and should not be used interchangeably.
Magnitude 7.0 is a moment-magnitude value, not properly a “7.0 on the Richter scale.”

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2010

Neanderthal genome project

Most of the draft came from 400 milligrams of powder drilled out of three Neanderthal bones — and in one sample, more than 95% of the DNA recovered belonged to bacteria.

A draft, announced 6 May 2010

The Max Planck Society announced on 6 May 2010 that an international team led by Svante Pääbo had produced an initial draft of the Neanderthal genome — the first genome sequence from an extinct human relative.

The draft covered more than 60% of the genome, about 4 billion base pairs, assembled from over a billion short and damaged DNA fragments. It was a draft, not a finished, gap-free sequence.

The peer-reviewed paper, by Richard E. Green and more than 50 co-authors, appeared in the 7 May issue of Science.

Four hundred milligrams of bone powder

The sequence incorporated DNA from Neanderthal remains found in Croatia, Germany, Spain and Russia. Most of the usable material came from three female individuals from Croatia's Vindija Cave — 400 milligrams of powder.

Contamination was the constant obstacle: in one sample, more than 95% of the recovered DNA belonged to bacteria and other microorganisms rather than to the Neanderthal.

Four years of ancient-DNA extraction, contamination control and high-throughput sequencing produced enough nuclear DNA to compare Neanderthals directly with living human genomes.

The nuclear data reversed the mitochondrial answer

Comparison with five present-day human genomes found Neanderthals slightly more closely related to people outside Africa than to Africans. The team read that systematic excess as evidence of gene flow between Neanderthals and early modern humans.

Earlier mitochondrial-DNA comparisons had detected no such admixture; this was a nuclear result, and it pointed the other way.

The much-quoted 1%–4% Neanderthal contribution was the paper's model-based estimate for many non-African populations, not a claim about every living person. This was also the Neanderthal Genome Project, not the Human Genome Project — which is what the corpus article filed under this date actually describes.

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Date corrected. The research places this at 2010-05-06.

What the sources leave uncertain

The institutional announcement is dated 6 May 2010 and its embargo expired that evening; the Science issue and project page use 7 May. Thus 6 May is the best date for the announcement, while 7 May is the publication date.
The 1%–4% estimate was the 2010 paper’s model-based estimate for many non-African populations, not a claim that every living person carries that exact proportion.