1947 in science

The year 1947 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Anthropology

August 7 – Thor Heyerdahl's balsa-wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 4300-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean, demonstrating that prehistoric peoples could have traveled from South America.

February 12 – Sikhote-Alin meteorite falls to Earth in Siberia, the largest iron meteorite known to have impacted.
February 20 – The first living things sent into space are fruit flies, accompanied by rye and cotton seeds, aboard a V-2 rocket launched by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps which reaches an altitude of 68 miles.
Bok globules are reported.

The Oxford Swift Research Project, based on the colony at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, is started by David and Elizabeth Lack. It will still be running more than sixty years later.
David Lack publishes Darwin's Finches.Zika virus first isolated from a rhesus macaque in the Zika Forest of Uganda.Influenza C virus first isolated.

January 25 – Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann file a United States patent request for an invention described as a "cathode-ray tube amusement device", probably the first video game.
July 29 – After being shut off on November 9, 1946, for a refurbishment and relocation, ENIAC, one of the world's first digital computers, is turned on after a memory upgrade at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. It will remain in continuous operation until October 2, 1955.
August 18 – Official start of construction of Automatic Computing Engine in the United Kingdom.
September 9 – A moth lodged in a relay is found to be the cause of a malfunction in the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer, logged as "First actual case of bug being found."
October – First recorded use of the word computer in its modern sense, referring to an electronic digital machine.

January – Prosopagnosia is first named by German neurologist Joachim Bodamer.
August 20 – Doctors' Trial concludes, establishing the Nuremberg Code as a model of research ethics for human subject research.
November 29 – Mary Barber publishes her classic paper on antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus bacteria.
The first antithyroid drug, propylthiouracil, is introduced in the United States.
The first use of defibrillation on a human subject is performed by Claude Beck, professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University.

February 21 – Edwin H. Land demonstrates the first practical instant camera, the Land Camera, in New York City. It will first be on commercial sale in December 1948.
November 13 – First AK-47 selective-fire, gas-operated assault rifle produced in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov.
November 17–December 23 – John Bardeen and Walter Brattain working under William Shockley at AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States demonstrate the transistor effect.
December 11 – A hexagonal cellular telephone network is proposed by Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs for mobile phones in vehicles.
The clavioline is invented by Constant Martin.
The disposable nappy is invented by Valerie Hunter Gordon.
Raytheon produces the first commercial microwave oven.