1 January 2002 The Euro arrives in the pockets of Europeans. The new single currency is officially in use from today in the twelve countries of the Union which were the first to decide to adopt it: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Portugal and Spain.
7 January 1610 After several days of observations, Galileo Galilei and Simon Marius discover the four largest satellites of Jupiter, which they call Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto: stating that the four celestial bodies were in orbit around the planet, the two with their discovery will give solid support to the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, according to which not all the objects of the System Solar orbited the Earth.
7 January 2007 They are isolated stem cells in the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus during pregnancy: the first author of the study that sanctions the discovery, published in the journal “Nature Biotechnology”, is the Italian researcher and pediatric surgeon Paolo De Coppi.
9 January 1951 It opens in Manhattan, New York on glass building headquarters of the United Nations (UN), designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.
13 January 1985 Start the so-called "snowfall of the century" on northern Italy: maximum expression of the extraordinary cold wave that affected the country in the first half of January 1985, for four days it will cause serious inconvenience in all the territories concerned.
14 January 1968 In the night a violent 6.4 magnitude earthquake hits the Belice Valley, a large area of western Sicily, involving territories in the provinces of Trapani, Agrigento and Palermo.
19 January 1915 After presenting it to the public for the first time at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, the engineer Georges Claude obtained the patent for the neon lamp.
21 January 1908 The Eiffel tower houses a new antenna for the long distance radio transmission.
23 January 1957 The American toy manufacturer Wham-O inaugurates the industrial production of the plastic disc originally called "Pluto Platter", which will become the Frisbee game.
26 January 1500 The Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, captain of the Niña during Christopher Columbus' voyage to the new world, is swept away by the currents of a storm and discovers the northern coasts of present-day Brazil: however, due to what was established with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Spain could not claim the territory which therefore went to Portugal.
27 January 1880 Thomas Edison gets in the United States the patent for the incandescent electric lamp.
28 January 1958 The Danish entrepreneur Ole Kirk Kristiansen patents the new version of lego bricks, with the particular shape that characterizes the assembly. The name, already conceived in 1934, derives from the union of two Danish words, "Leg godt"i.e. "play well".
28 January 1986 73 seconds after the launch of its tenth mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Space Shuttle Challenger explodes in flight.
29 January 1886 The German engineer Karl Benz patents the Patent Motorwagen in Germany: three-wheeled and also nicknamed “Veloped”, is considered the first automobile in history with an internal combustion engine.
31 January 1930 Enter the trade "Scotch tape", the adhesive tape of the American multinational 3M Company invented by the American journalist Richard Drew: it will arrive in Europe in 1937.