2012:
July 4 – CERN announces the discovery of a new particle with properties consistent with the Higgs boson after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
July 20 – 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting: 12 people die and 58 are injured in a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The shooter, James Holmes, opens fire on a crowd during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. He is found behind the theater claiming to be “The Joker”
July 23 – The Solar storm of 2012 was an unusually large coronal mass ejection that was emitted by the Sun which barely missed the Earth by nine days. If it hit, it would have caused up to US$2.6 trillion in damages to electrical equipment worldwide.
August 6 – Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s rover, successfully lands on Mars.
September 11–27 – A series of terrorist attacks are directed against United States diplomatic missions worldwide, as well as diplomatic missions of Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In the US, opinions are divided over whether the attacks are a reaction to a YouTube trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims. In Libya, among the dead is US ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Leading to 4 years of senate hearings, while the later death of 230,000 Americans will be met with silence in the Senate.
October 14 – Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner becomes the first person to break the sound barrier without any machine assistance, during a record space dive out of the Red Bull Stratos helium-filled balloon from 128,000 ft (24 miles (39 km)) over Roswell, New Mexico in the United States.
October 22 – November 2 – Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record (as measured by diameter, with tropical-storm-force winds spanning 900 miles (1,400 km)), wreaks havoc, resulting in 233 total deaths and $68.7 billion (2012 USD) damage.
October 26 – Windows 8 from Microsoft was released. YES, that REALLY happened- you weren’t imagining it
November 6 – Barack Obama is reelected President of the United States.
November 13 – A total solar eclipse occurs in parts of Australia and the South Pacific. It is the 45th of 72 solar eclipses of Solar Saros 133.