User:Prototyperspective/sandbox

A number of significant scientific events have occurred or are scheduled to occur in 2020.

July

 * 1 July
 * Scientist at CERN report that the LHCb experiment has observed a four-charm tetraquark particle never seen before, which is likely to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles.
 * Scientists report that they measured that quantum vacuum fluctuations can influence the motion of macroscopic, human-scale objects for the first time by measuring correlations below the standard quantum limit between the position/momentum uncertainty of the mirrors of LIGO and the photon number/phase uncertainty of light that they reflect.
 * 2 July – Scientists report that a more infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant with spike protein variant G614 has replaced D614 as the dominant form in the pandemic.
 * 3 July
 * Scientists report in a preprint that a major genetic risk factor of the COVID-19 virus was inherited from archaic Neanderthals ~60,000 years ago.
 * Scientists show that adding an organic-based ionic solid into perovskites can result in substantial improvement in solar cell performance and stability. The study also reveals a complex degradation route that is responsible for failures in aged perovskite solar cells. The understanding could help the future development of photovoltaic technologies with industrially relevant longevity.
 * Via analysis of satellite images, scientists show that certified "sustainable" palm oil production resulted in deforestation of tropical forests of Sumatra and Borneo and endangered mammals' habitat degradation in the last 30 years.
 * 4 July
 * According to WHO chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of COVID-19 and related pandemic is currently estimated at 0.6%, and the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) at 5%.
 * Scientists report that COVID-19 may be an airborne disease, and not just one transmitted by droplets of the virus in the air or on surfaces.
 * 6 July
 * Astronomers report evidence that the chemical element carbon, the fourth most abundant chemical element (after hydrogen, helium and oxygen) in the universe, and one of the most essential chemical elements for the formation of life as we know it, was formed mainly in white dwarf stars, particularly those bigger than two solar masses.
 * The Versatile Video Coding standard (H.266) is finalised, designed to halve the bitrate of previous formats, and paving the way for on-demand 8K streaming services.
 * Scientists report that analysis of simulations and a recent observational field model show that maximum rates of directional change of Earth's magnetic field reached ~10° per year – almost 100 times faster than current changes and ~10 times faster than previously thought.
 * Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin demonstrate a cobalt-free, high-energy, lithium-ion battery.
 * 8 July
 * Scientists writing in the journal Brain publish evidence that a few mildly affected or recovering COVID-19 patients can be left with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions, such as delirium, inflammation, nerve damage, and psychosis.
 * Mitochondria are gene-edited for the first time, using a new kind of CRISPR-free base editor (DdCBE), by a team at the Broad Institute.
 * The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) announces that it assesses a 20% chance that global warming compared to pre-industrial levels will exceed 1.5 °C in at least one year within the five years of 2020-2024. 1.5 °C is often considered to be a key threshold of global warming and nations have agreed to attempt limiting contemporary climate change to it under the Paris Agreement.
 * A team of researchers report that they succeeded in using a genetically-altered variant of R. sulfidophilum to produce spidroins, the main proteins in spider silk.
 * Scientists assess that the geoengineering technique of enhanced rock weathering – spreading finely crushed basalt on fields – has potential use for carbon dioxide removal by nations, identifying costs, opportunities and engineering challenges.
 * Scientist report the development of a mobile robot chemist and demonstrate that it can assist in experimental searches. According to the scientists their strategy was automating the researcher rather than the instruments – freeing up time for the human researchers to think creatively – and could identify photocatalyst mixtures for hydrogen production from water that were six times more active than initial formulations.
 * 9 July – The World Health Organization (WHO) formally recognises that COVID-19 can be transmitted indoors by droplets in the air. People in crowded settings with poor ventilation run the risk of being infected, according to the updated scientific advice.
 * 10 July
 * Astronomers announce the discovery of the South Pole Wall, a massive cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies (a galaxy filament) that extends across at least 700 million light-years of space.
 * Scientists report that phytoplankton primary production in the Arctic Ocean increased by 57% between 1998 and 2018 due to higher concentrations, suggesting the ocean may be able to support higher trophic level production and additional carbon fixation in the future.
 * Scientists report that the Moon formed about 85 million years earlier than thought (4.425 ±0.025 bya) and that it hosted an ocean of magma for longer than previously thought (~200 million years).
 * 13 July – Researchers report the development of a reusable aluminium surface for efficient solar-based water sanitation to below the WHO and EPA standards for drinkable water.
 * 14 July – Scientists report the first complete and gap-less assembly of a human X chromosome.
 * 15 July
 * Researchers report the discovery of chemolithoautotrophic bacterial culture that feeds on the metal manganese after performing unrelated experiments and named its bacterial species Candidatus Manganitrophus noduliformans and Ramlibacter lithotrophicus.
 * In two studies researchers of the Global Carbon Project summarise and analyse new estimates of the global methane budget and provide data and insights on sources and sinks for the geographical regions and economic sectors where the rising anthropogenic methane emissions have changed the most over recent decades. According to the studies, global methane emissions for the 2008 to 2017 decade increased by almost 10 percent compared to the previous decade.
 * 16 July – Scientists report to have identified 10 genomic loci which appear to intrinsically influence healthspan, lifespan, and longevity – of which half have not been reported previously at genome-wide significance and most being associated with cardiovascular disease – as well as haem metabolism as a promising candidate for further research within the field. Their study using public biological data on 1.75 m people with known lifespans overall, suggests that haem metabolism may play a role in human ageing and that high levels of iron in the blood likely reduce, and genes involved in metabolising iron likely increase healthy years of life in humans.
 * 17 July – Scientists report that yeast cells of the same genetic material and within the same environment age in two distinct ways, describe a biomolecular mechanism that can determine which process dominates during aging and genetically engineer a novel aging route with substantially extended lifespan.
 * 19 July
 * The Emirates Mars Mission by the UAE is successfully launched, carrying the Hope probe to Mars, with a scheduled arrival date of February 2021.
 * After a 20-year-long survey, astrophysicists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey publish the largest, most detailed 3D map of the universe so far, fill a gap of 11 billion years in its expansion history, and provide data which supports the theory of a flat geometry of the universe and confirms that different regions seem to be expanding at different speeds.
 * 22 July
 * Astronomers publish a photo, for the first-time, of multiple exoplanets orbiting a sunlike star, particularly the star TYC 8998-760-1.
 * Archaeologists report the earliest known evidence of humans in the Americas, dating back 33,000 years, twice the previously oldest known settlement of the continent.
 * Scientists confirm the first active leak of sea-bed methane in Antarctica and report that "the rate of microbial succession may have an unrealized impact on greenhouse gas emission from marine methane reservoirs".
 * Researchers report the development of a technique to produce a degradable version of the tough thermoset plastic pDCPD which may also be applicable to other plastics, that aren't part of the ca. 75% of plastics that are recycable.
 * Scientists report results of a survey of 371 reefs in 58 nations estimating the conservation status of reef sharks globally. No sharks have been observed on almost 20% of the surveyed reefs and shark depletion was strongly associated with both socio-economic conditions and conservation measures. Sharks are considered to be a vital part of the ocean ecosystem.
 * A paper on a "hummingbird-sized dinosaur" conserved in amber published on March 11th is retracted after reviewers agreed with assessments – of which one was uploaded to a preprint server on March 18 – claiming a misclassification of the fossil, believed to be a lizard instead of a dinosaur.
 * 23 July
 * China successfully launches Tianwen-1, its first rover mission to Mars, with a planned surface landing date of 23 April 2021.
 * Astronomers report the observation of a "hard tidal disruption event candidate" associated with ASASSN-20hx, located near the nucleus of galaxy NGC 6297, and noted that the observation represented one of the "very few tidal disruption events with hard powerlaw X-ray spectra".
 * Lancaster University researcher Mike Ryder describes the nature and rise of the "robot prosumer", derived from modern-day technology and related participatory culture, that, in turn, was substantially predicted earlier by science fiction writers.
 * 24 July – Scientists report the development of an AI-based process using genome databases for evolutionary algorithm-based designing novel proteins. They used deep learning to identify design-rules.
 * 27 July – A new AI algorithm by the University of Pittsburgh achieves the highest accuracy to date in identifying prostate cancer, with 98% sensitivity and 97% specificity.
 * 28 July
 * Marine biologists report that aerobic microorganisms (mainly), in "quasi-suspended animation", were found in organically-poor sediments, up to 101.5 million years old, 68.9 m below the seafloor in the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) ("the deadest spot in the ocean"), and could be the longest-living life forms ever found.
 * Assembly of the ITER experimental fusion reactor officially begins in France, with a scheduled completion date of 2025.
 * 29 July
 * Scientists of the NA62 experiment at CERN claim to have presented first evidence of a highly rare process – a decay of a charged kaon – predicted in the Standard Model which may help identifying possible deviations from the model.
 * Scientists report that they have transformed the abundant diamagnetic material known as "fool's gold" and pyrite into a ferromagnetic one by inducing voltage, which may lead to techniques with potential applications for devices such as magnetic data storage ones.
 * Scientists report that work honored by Nobel prizes clusters in only a few scientific fields with only 36/71 having received at least one Nobel prize of the 114/849 domains science could be divided into according to their DC2 and DC3 classification systems. Five of the 114 domains were shown to make up over half of the Nobel prizes awarded 1995–2017 (particle physics [14%], cell biology [12.1%], atomic physics [10.9%], neuroscience [10.1%], molecular chemistry [5.3%]).
 * Scientists report that geochemical data shows that the origin of 50 of the 52 sarsen megaliths used to construct Stonehenge is most likely West Woods, Wiltshire, 25 km north of Stonehenge.
 * 30 July – NASA successfully launches its Mars 2020 rover mission to search for signs of ancient life and collect samples for return to Earth. The mission includes technology demonstrations to prepare for future human missions.
 * 31 July
 * Two ice caps in Nunavut, Canada have disappeared completely, confirming predictions of a study published in 2017 that they would melt completely within five years.
 * A study suggests a volcanic cause for the Younger Dryas geochemical anomalies including the extinction of many ice-age animals about 12,800 years ago and weakens the support for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

August

 * 1 August – Brazil's National Institute for Space Research reports that satellite data shows that the number of fires in the Amazon increased by 28% to ~6,800 fires in July compared to the ~5,300 wildfires in July 2019. This indicates a, potentially worsened, repeat of 2019's accelerated destruction of one of the world's largest protectable buffers against global warming.
 * 2 August – Scientists report a newly discovered vulnerability in SARS-CoV-2's spike protein – a positively charged cleavage site near its binding site, which they demonstrate could be exploited by negatively charged molecule that bind to it and thereby inhibit the virus from bonding strongly to the host cell.
 * 3 August – Scientists report that valley networks in the southern highlands of Mars may have been formed mostly under glaciers, not free-flowing rivers of water, indicating that early Mars was colder than thought and that extensive glaciation likely occurred in its past.
 * 4 August
 * Physicists working on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announce new results indicating that the Higgs boson decays into two muons as expected.
 * Astronomers report that self-annihilating dark matter (DM) is not the explanation for the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE) in the center of the Milky Way galaxy after all, stating: "there is no significant excess in the [GCE] that may be attributed to DM annihilation."
 * 5 August
 * The British Antarctic Survey reports that emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica are nearly 20% more numerous than previously thought, with new discoveries made using satellite mapping technology.
 * New Guinea is determined to be the world's most floristically diverse island with well over 13,000 confirmed species of vascular plants recorded thus far, surpassing that of Madagascar.
 * 6 August
 * The Canadian Ice Service reports that the Milne Ice Shelf, the last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic, has collapsed after losing more than 40% of its area in just two days.
 * Scientists report the creation of the brightest fluorescent solid optical materials so far by enabling the transfer of properties of highly fluorescent dyes via spatial and electronic isolation of the dyes by mixing cationic dyes with anion-binding cyanostar macrocycles. According to a co-author these materials may have applications in areas such as solar energy harvesting, bioimaging, and lasers.
 * Scientists present an extension to an algorithm to infer local genetic relationships published in October 2019 and report that 3% of the Neanderthal genome was introgressed from ancient humans ~200-300kya and predict that 1% of the Denisovan genome was introgressed from an unknown highly diverged, archaic hominin ancestor of which 15% were introgressed into modern humans alive today.
 * 7 August
 * A study concludes that the direct effect of the response to the pandemic on global warming will likely be negligible, with an estimated cooling of around 0.01 ±0.005 °C by 2030 and that a well-designed economic recovery could avoid future warming of 0.3 °C by 2050. The study indicates that systemic change for "decarbonization" of humanity's economic structures is required for a substantial impact on global warming.
 * Russia's Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin announces that he wishes for the agency to return to Venus and to bring back surface materials and that they are building a reusable rocket.
 * 8 August – NASA announces it will change unofficial and potentially contentious names used by the scientific community for distant cosmic objects and systems including references to NGC 2392 as "the Eskimo Nebula" and NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 as the "Siamese Twins Galaxy".
 * 10 August
 * The dwarf planet Ceres is confirmed to be a water-rich body, containing a deep reservoir of brine, based on analysis of data from the Dawn mission. The "bright spots" in Occator crater are the result of salty water rising to the surface from below.
 * Scientists report that bi-directional connections, or added appropriate feedback connections, can accelerate and improve communication between and in modular neural networks of the brain's cerebral cortex and lower the threshold for their successful communication.
 * 11 August
 * COVID-19 pandemic: Russian President Vladimir Putin announces that Russia has approved the world's first COVID-19 vaccine. This is a controversial step due to widely perceived lack of sufficient testing of the vaccine.
 * Astronomers announce the discovery of S4714, a star orbiting the black hole at the center of the Milky Way at up to 8% the speed of light.
 * 12 August
 * The latest State of the Climate report finds that 2010 to 2019 was the hottest decade on record globally, with an increase of 0.39 °C (0.7 °F) above the long-term average, and 2019 either the second or third warmest year on record.
 * Scientists report that bacteria that feed on air discovered 2017 in Antarctica are likely not limited to Antarctica after discovering the two genes previously linked to their "atmospheric chemosynthesis" in soil of two other similar cold desert sites, which provides further information on this carbon sink and further strengthens the extremophile evidence that supports the potential existence of microbial life on alien planets.
 * 13 August
 * Scientists at the University of Southern California report the "likely" order of initial symptoms of the COVID-19 disease: "fever, cough, muscle pain, and then nausea, and/or vomiting, and diarrhea".
 * Unexpected dimming of Betelgeuse is explained by NASA as a "traumatic outburst", caused by an immense amount of hot material ejected into space, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight. On 30 August 2020, astronomers reported the detection of a second dust cloud emitted from Betelgeuse, and associated with a secondary minimum on 3 August in luminosity of the star.
 * Universal coherence protection is reported to have been achieved in a solid-state spin qubit, a modification that allows quantum systems to stay operational (or "coherent") for 10,000 times longer than before.
 * July 2020 is tied as the second-warmest July on record, with a record low Arctic sea ice extent for the month, in a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
 * Melting of the Greenland ice sheet is shown to have passed the point of no return, based on 40 years of satellite data, by scientists at Ohio State University. The switch to a dynamic state of sustained mass loss resulted from widespread retreat in 2000-2005.
 * 14 August – Scientists report the discovery of the oldest grass bedding from at least 200,000 years ago, much older than the oldest previously known bedding. They speculate that insect-repellent plants and ash layers, sometimes due to burned older grass beddings, found beneath the bedding have been used for a dirt-free, insulated base and to keep away arthropods.
 * 16 August – Astronomers report the detection of asteroid 2020 QG, a small Earth-crossing near-Earth asteroid of the Apollo group that passed the Earth about 2950 km away, the closest known asteroid to pass the Earth that did not impact the planet.
 * 17 August
 * Astronomers report that the interstellar object ʻOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) is not likely to be composed of frozen hydrogen which had been proposed earlier. The compositional nature of the object continues to be unknown. Nonetheless, the possibility that the interstellar object may be alien technology has not been ruled out, although such an explanation is reported to be a "long shot" by "most scientists".
 * Physicists present a study involving interpretations of quantum mechanics that is related to the Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend paradoxes, and results in conclusions that challenge seemingly established assumptions about reality and go beyond Bell's theorem.
 * 18 August
 * Scientists report that bird skull evolution decelerated compared with the evolution of their dinosaur predecessors after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, rather than accelerating as often believed to have caused the cranial shape diversity of modern birds.
 * Scientists report the achievement of a milestone in the development of laser-plasma accelerators and demonstrate their longest stable operation of 30 hours. These particle accelerators are far smaller than conventional ones, may have technological applications and may provide a way to energies beyond the LHC.
 * 19 August
 * An analysis indicates that sustainable seafood could increase by 36–74% by 2050 compared to current yields and that whether or not these production potentials are realized sustainably depends on factors such as policy reforms, technological innovation and the extent of future shifts in demand.
 * Researchers report that widespread declines in Pacific salmon size resulted in substantial losses to ecosystems and people, which they estimate, and are associated with factors that include climate change and competition with growing numbers of wild and hatchery salmon.
 * Researchers provide explanations for variations in the rate of global mean sea-level rise since 1900 and report that dam building in the 20th century offset factors that would have led to a higher rate during the 1970s, implying that no additional processes are required to explain the observed major variations.
 * 20 August – Scientists report that the Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of 532 billion metric tons of ice during 2019, surpassing the old record of 464 billion metric tons in 2012 and returning to high melt rates, and provide explanations for the reduced ice loss in 2017 and 2018.
 * 21 August – Scientists, via genomic analysis, identify a large number of mammals that can potentially be infected by SARS-CoV-2 and therefore could possibly become intermediate hosts for the virus.
 * 24 August
 * A study finds that almost 300 million people live on tropical forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South, constituting a large share of low-income countries' populations, and argues for prioritized inclusion of "local communities" in forest restoration projects.
 * Researchers assess potential global soil erosion rates by water due to projected climate- and land use-change for multiple SSP-RCP scenarios, indicating that global soil erosion by water may increase 30-66% between 2015 and 2070 and that the greatest increases will occur in areas with tropical climates, which could inform strategies for soil conservation.
 * 26 August
 * Scientists report that bacteria from Earth, particularly Deinococcus radiodurans, were found to survive for three years in outer space, based on studies on the International Space Station. These findings support the notion of panspermia.
 * Scientists report that that ionizing radiation from environmental radioactive materials and cosmic rays may substantially limit the coherence times of qubits if they aren't shielded adequately.
 * Scientists report that the average global temperature of the last ice age, or Last Glacial Maximum, was ~6.1 °C cooler than today and that the equilibrium climate sensitivity was 3.4 °C, consistent with the established consensus range of 2–4.5 °C.
 * 27 August
 * Researchers report that sufficient water to fill the oceans may have always been on the Earth since the planet's formation.
 * Scientists report evidence of the hibernation-like state torpor in Lystrosaurus living ~250 Mya in Antarctica – the oldest evidence of a hibernation-like state in a vertebrate animal.
 * 28 August
 * Elon Musk reveals a model of the prototype brain–computer interface chip, implanted in pigs, that his company Neuralink has been working on.
 * Scientists describe a way cells – in particular cells of a slime mold and mouse pancreatic cancer–derived cells – are able to navigate efficiently through a body and identify the best routes through complex mazes: generating gradients after breaking down diffused chemoattractants which enable them to sense upcoming maze junctions before reaching them, including around corners.
 * Quantum engineers working for Google report the largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer – a Hartree-Fock approximation with Sycamore paired with a classical computer that analyzed results to provide new parameters for the 12-qubit system.
 * 31 August
 * Scientists report that New Guinea singing dogs, known for their characteristic vocalization, are not extinct in the wild as was previously commonly believed after analyzing blood samples of specimens found in highlands of New Guinea.
 * Scientists report that observed ice-sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica track worst case scenarios of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report's sea-level rise projections.

September

 * 1 September – A new infrared spectroscopy method capable of 80 million spectra per second, nearly 100 times faster than previous techniques, is reported by the University of Tokyo.
 * 2 September
 * The largest known black hole merger, detected in May 2019, is confirmed, which also provides the first clear evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole. The resulting object, producing a gravitational wave called GW190521, is estimated at 142 solar masses.
 * Researchers in China demonstrate how microplastic pollution contaminates the soil and harms the abundance of common species, such as microarthropods and nematodes, as well as disrupting carbon and nutrient cycling.
 * 8 September – Scientists in northern India discover the fossil molar tooth of a new extinct species, and oldest known ancestor of gibbons, named Kapi ramnagarensis, that lived about 13 million years ago.
 * 14 September – The detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus is reported by astronomers using both the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. This may indicate a biosignature.

Predicted and scheduled events

 * December 21: Jupiter and Saturn come within a 6' arc (called Great Conjunction), giving a rare telescopic view of the two so close together. As the two planets have an apparent size smaller than one arc minute occultations are extremely rare, the next one will happen in the year 7541.

Date unknown

 * Shenzhen East Waste-to-Energy Plant is planned to become operational, the largest waste to energy (WET) power plant in the world.
 * Waymo, the first self-driving cars in ride-hailing services are announced for 2020.
 * The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is expected to achieve first light in 2020.

Deaths

 * July 1 – Ray Matheny, American anthropologist (b. 1925)
 * July 2
 * Ángela Jeria, Chilean archeologist (b. 1926)
 * Xu Qifeng, Chinese engineer (b. 1936)
 * Willem van Zwet, Dutch mathematician (b. 1934)
 * July 3 – Erika Taube, German ethnologist (b. 1933)
 * July 5 – Horace Barlow, British neuroscientist (b. 1921)
 * July 6
 * Ronald Graham, American mathematician (b. 1935)
 * Deborah Zamble, Canadian chemist (b. 1971)
 * July 7
 * Millicent S. Ficken, American ornithologist (b. 1933)
 * Juan Rosai, American pathologist (b. 1940)
 * Henk Tennekes, American toxicologist (b. 1950)
 * July 8
 * Norman Allinger, American chemist (b. 1928)
 * Flossie Wong-Staal, Chinese and American virologist and molecular biologist (b. 1946)
 * July 9 – Tong Binggang, Chinese physicist (b. 1927)
 * July 10
 * Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, Indian and American microbiologist (b. 1938)
 * Michael M. Richter, German mathematician and computer scientist (b. 1938)
 * July 11 – Lim Boo Liat, Malaysian zoologist (b. 1926)
 * July 14
 * Tim Clark, British physician (b. 1935)
 * Caesar Korolenko, Russian psychiatrist (b. 1933)
 * Alex McCool, American manager of the Space Shuttle Projects Office at NASA (b. 1923)
 * July 13
 * Grant Imahara, American electrical engineer (b. 1970)
 * Zeng Yi, Chinese virologist (b. 1929)
 * July 15 – George Simon, Guyanese archeologist (b. 1947)
 * July 17
 * Angela von Nowakonski, Brazilian physician and medical researcher (b. 1953)
 * C. S. Seshadri, Indian mathematician (b. 1932)
 * Ron Tauranac, British and Australian engineer (b. 1925)
 * July 21 – Li Jijun, Chinese geographer and geomorphologist
 * July 23
 * Masakazu Konishi, Japanese neurobiologist (b. 1933)
 * Jacqueline Noonan, American pediatric cardiologist (b. 1928)
 * Ward Plummer, American physicist (b. 1940)
 * Paolo Sassone-Corsi, Italian microbiologist (b. 1956)
 * July 24 – Zheng Shouren, Chinese engineer (b. 1940)
 * July 26
 * R. Stephen Berry, American physical chemist (b. 1931)
 * Roger Williams, British hepatologist (b. 1931)
 * Bill English, American computer engineer and co-developer of the computer mouse (b. 1929)
 * August 1
 * Frank Barnaby, British nuclear physicist (b. 1927)
 * Rosemary Radley-Smith, British peadatric cardiologist (b. 1939)
 * August 2 – Gregory Areshian, Armenian and American archeologist (b. 1949)
 * August 4
 * Frances Allen, American computer scientist, first woman to win the Turing Award (b. 1932)
 * Irene D. Long, American physician (b. 1950)
 * Jan Strelau, Polish psychologist (b. 1931)
 * August 6 – Louis Meznarie, French engineer (b. 1930)
 * August 7
 * Lungile Pepeta, South African paedatric cardiologist (b. 1974)
 * Edward Bruner, American anthropologist (b. 1924)
 * August 8
 * Dóra S. Bjarnason, Icelandic sociologist (b. 1947)
 * Bert Laeyendecker, Dutch sociologist (b. 1930)
 * Konrad Steffen, Swiss glaciologist (b. 1952)
 * August 9 – Calaway H. Dodson, American botanist (b. 1928)
 * August 11 – Russell Kirsch, American computer scientist and inventor of the first digital image scanner (b. 1929)
 * August 12 – Robert Williams, American psychologist (b. 1930)
 * August 13
 * Peter Stuart Excell, British engineer (b. 1948)
 * Bernd Fischer, German mathematician (b. 1936)
 * August 14 – Kenneth Kunen, American mathematician (b. 1943)
 * August 16
 * Nina McClelland, American chemist (b. 1929)
 * Jean-Michel Savéant, French chemist (b. 1933)
 * August 17 – Richard M. White, American electrical engineer (b. 1930)
 * August 18 – Han Woerdman, Dutch physicist (b. 1942)
 * August 19 – Borys Paton, Ukrainian scientist (b. 1918)
 * August 20 – Herbert Tabor, American biochemist (b. 1918)
 * August 23 – Neil Douglas, British physician (b. 1949)
 * August 25
 * Erik Allardt, Finnish sociologist (b. 1925)
 * Rebeca Guber, Argentine mathematician and computer scientist (b.1926)
 * Arnold Spielberg, American electrical engineer (b. 1917)
 * August 26 – Gerald Carr, American astronaut and aeronautical engineer (b. 1932)
 * August 28 – Seymour I. Schwartz, American surgeon (b. 1928)