Table of Contents
Timeline of 2010
A chronological index of notable events in the year 2010, drawn from the knowledge base.
| Date | Event | Category | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 4, 2010 | Burj Khalifa opens — Dubai inaugurates the world’s tallest building at 828 metres, surpassing Taipei 101 and redefining the limits of skyscraper engineering | Science & Technology | details |
| January 12, 2010 | Haiti earthquake — magnitude 7.0 quake near Port-au-Prince kills an estimated 100,000–316,000 people | History & Politics | details |
| January 12, 2010 | Google announces withdrawal from China — Google announces it will stop censoring search results in China, redirecting to Hong Kong servers | Science & Technology | details |
| January 21, 2010 | Citizens United v. FEC — the US Supreme Court rules 5–4 that the First Amendment bars limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions, enabling Super PACs and reshaping US campaign finance | History & Politics | details |
| January 21, 2010 | Toyota recall crisis — Toyota recalls about 2.3 million vehicles for sticky accelerator pedals and days later suspends US sales of eight models, part of the largest automotive recall in history (over 8 million vehicles worldwide) | Society & Economics | details |
| January 22, 2010 | Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show transition — O’Brien’s final Tonight Show airs after NBC moves to reinstate Jay Leno at 11:35 p.m.; the “#TeamConan” backlash becomes an early demonstration of social-media mobilization | Arts & Culture | details |
| January 25, 2010 | Avatar becomes highest-grossing film — James Cameron’s 3D epic surpasses Titanic to become the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, driving the modern 3D cinema boom | Arts & Culture | details |
| January 27, 2010 | J. D. Salinger dies — the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye dies at his Cornish, New Hampshire home aged 91, ending one of twentieth-century American literature’s most influential and enigmatic careers | People | details |
| January 27, 2010 | Steve Jobs’ 2010 product renaissance — Jobs unveils the iPad, later launches the iPhone 4 with its Retina display, and leads Apple past Microsoft in May as the world’s most valuable technology company | People | details |
| January 31, 2010 | 52nd Grammy Awards — Beyoncé wins a record six awards for a female artist in a single night, including Song of the Year for “Single Ladies,” as a 3D Michael Jackson tribute anchors the most-watched Grammy telecast since 2004 | Arts & Culture | details |
| Throughout 2010 | 3D cinema revolution — Avatar’s success catalyzes rapid 3D adoption across theaters and studios; 3D films earn about $1.3 billion in 2010 and establish durable premium theatrical pricing | Arts & Culture | details |
| February 9, 2010 | Google Buzz launched — Google adds a social layer to Gmail to rival Facebook and Twitter, drawing 9 million posts in 56 hours, but automatic exposure of users’ email contacts triggers a privacy backlash, FTC action, and shutdown within two years | Science & Technology | details |
| February 12–28, 2010 | 2010 Winter Olympics (Vancouver) — Canada hosts the Winter Games and wins a record 14 golds as host nation; Sidney Crosby’s overtime goal seals men’s hockey gold before 114 million viewers worldwide | History & Politics | details |
| February 19, 2010 | Tiger Woods’ 2010 crisis — Woods delivers a televised apology for infidelity at PGA Tour headquarters; major sponsors drop him and he later loses his world No. 1 ranking, a watershed for social-media-age celebrity accountability | People | details |
| February 27, 2010 | 2010 Chile earthquake — magnitude 8.8 megathrust quake and Pacific tsunami off the Maule coast kill 525 people; one of the strongest earthquakes ever instrumentally recorded | History & Politics | details |
| Throughout 2010 | Venture capital recovery — US venture funding rebounds to $21.8 billion across 3,277 deals, a 19.4% rise and the first annual increase since 2007, as accelerators and billion-dollar private valuations reshape early-stage investing | Society & Economics | details |
| March 7, 2010 | 82nd Academy Awards — Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker wins Best Picture and Best Director, making Bigelow the first woman to win the directing Oscar, in a ceremony that expanded the Best Picture field to ten nominees | Arts & Culture | details |
| March 23, 2010 | Affordable Care Act signed — President Obama signs the most significant US healthcare overhaul since Medicare/Medicaid in 1965 | Society & Economics | details |
| March 26, 2010 | Sinking of ROKS Cheonan — the South Korean corvette Cheonan breaks apart and sinks in the Yellow Sea near Baengnyeong Island, killing 46 sailors; a multinational investigation later attributes it to a North Korean torpedo | History & Politics | details |
| March 30, 2010 | Large Hadron Collider first 7 TeV collisions — CERN’s LHC collides proton beams at a record 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy (3.5 TeV per beam), launching the physics run that led to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson | Science & Technology | details |
| April 1, 2010 | 2010 United States Census — the decennial count’s reference date records 308,745,538 residents (9.7% growth since 2000), driving congressional reapportionment toward the South and West and documenting a rapidly diversifying population | Society & Economics | details |
| April 3, 2010 | iPad launched — Apple releases the iPad, establishing the modern tablet computing category and selling 15 million units in its first year | Science & Technology | details |
| April 8, 2010 | New START Treaty signed — Presidents Obama and Medvedev sign the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in Prague, capping each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 delivery vehicles and restoring US–Russian arms-control verification after START I’s lapse | History & Politics | details |
| April 10, 2010 | Smolensk air disaster — a Polish Air Force Tu-154 crashes in dense fog near Smolensk, killing all 96 aboard, including President Lech Kaczyński, en route to a Katyn massacre commemoration | History & Politics | details |
| April 14, 2010 | Eyjafjallajökull eruption — Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupts, closing most European airspace and cancelling roughly 104,000 flights over six days | History & Politics | details |
| April 15, 2010 | Groupon Series C funding — the Chicago daily-deals company raises $135 million from DST Global and Battery Ventures at a $1.35 billion valuation, becoming the fastest startup to reach a billion-dollar valuation and symbolizing the social-commerce boom | Society & Economics | details |
| April 20, 2010 | Deepwater Horizon explosion — Blowout and explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig kills 11 workers, beginning the largest marine oil spill in history | History & Politics | details |
| May 1 – October 31, 2010 | Shanghai Expo 2010 opens — China hosts its first World’s Fair under the theme “Better City, Better Life,” drawing a record 73.08 million visits over 184 days, the highest attendance in Expo history | Society & Economics | details |
| May 2, 2010 | European sovereign debt crisis — euro-area states and the IMF agree a €110 billion bailout for Greece, then a €750 billion eurozone backstop on May 9–10, opening the acute phase of the crisis | Society & Economics | details |
| May 6, 2010 | 2010 United Kingdom general election — a hung parliament (Conservative 306, Labour 258, Lib Dem 57) ends 13 years of Labour rule and produces the UK’s first coalition government since World War II, led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg | History & Politics | details |
| May 6, 2010 | Flash Crash — the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls about 998 points (9%) in roughly 36 minutes before rebounding, briefly erasing nearly $1 trillion in value in the market’s first major algorithmic-trading breakdown | Society & Economics | details |
| May 10, 2010 | 2010 Philippine presidential election — Benigno Aquino III wins on the strength of his mother Corazon Aquino’s People Power legacy | People | details |
| May 11, 2010 | David Cameron becomes UK prime minister — at 43 the youngest since 1812, Cameron forms Britain’s first coalition government since World War II, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as deputy prime minister | People | details |
| May 17, 2010 | Biutiful premieres at Cannes — Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Spanish-language drama debuts in competition; Javier Bardem shares the Best Actor prize and later earns the first Oscar Best Actor nomination for an all-Spanish-language role | Arts & Culture | details |
| May 19, 2010 | 2010 Thai political crisis — Military crackdown ends a two-month Red Shirt occupation of Bangkok, killing at least 91 people and wounding over 1,800 | History & Politics | details |
| May 20, 2010 | First self-replicating synthetic cell — the J. Craig Venter Institute announces JCVI-syn1.0, a bacterium controlled by a chemically synthesized 1.08-million-base-pair genome | Science & Technology | details |
| May 20, 2010 | J. Craig Venter and synthetic biology leadership — geneticist J. Craig Venter leads the JCVI team publishing JCVI-syn1.0 in Science, framing biology as an engineering discipline and triggering an international bioethics debate | Science & Technology | details |
| May 22, 2010 | Bitcoin Pizza Day — programmer Laszlo Hanyecz pays 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, the first documented commercial bitcoin transaction and an early proof that the cryptocurrency could buy real-world goods | Society & Economics | details |
| May 26, 2010 | Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s global emergence — Facebook surpasses MySpace and reaches 500 million users in 2010; Zuckerberg unveils the Open Graph, is named Time Person of the Year, and becomes the world’s youngest self-made billionaire | People | details |
| May 26, 2010 | Foxconn labor crisis draws global scrutiny — international media report a cluster of worker suicides at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plants assembling Apple products, exposing punishing conditions and igniting a decade of debate over electronics supply-chain ethics | Society & Economics | details |
| May 31, 2010 | Mavi Marmara flotilla raid — Israeli naval commandos board a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza in international waters, killing nine activists and rupturing Israel–Turkey relations until 2016 | History & Politics | details |
| June 11 – July 11, 2010 | FIFA World Cup in South Africa — First World Cup held on the African continent; Spain wins their first title | History & Politics | details |
| Throughout 2010 | Global jobless recovery — world output rebounds from the 2008–09 crisis but unemployment stays persistently high (US 9.6%, eurozone 10.1%, ILO ~205 million jobless), defining a “jobless recovery” | Society & Economics | details |
| Throughout 2010 | Twitter and social media growth — Twitter scales to about 90 million tweets per day and roughly 145 million registered users, emerging as global real-time news infrastructure and launching its Promoted Tweets advertising model | Society & Economics | details |
| Throughout 2010 | Cleantech venture capital boom — cleantech VC and private equity investment climbs to $8.8 billion, up 28% from 2009, as record solar and wind funding fuels a technology-driven climate-solutions surge that preceded the sector’s later shakeout | Society & Economics | details |
| Throughout 2010 | Smartphone platform wars — Android sales surge 888% to overtake iOS as the second smartphone platform behind Symbian, cementing the iOS–Android duopoly that would define the mobile decade | Science & Technology | details |
| June 15, 2010 | YouTube’s mobile video milestone — by mid-2010 YouTube reaches 200 million users with 24 hours of video uploaded every minute, and mobile consumption triples during the year as it shifts from a desktop platform to a mobile-first video service | Science & Technology | details |
| June 17, 2010 | Stuxnet identified — VirusBlokAda isolates the Stuxnet worm, later revealed as the first known cyberweapon to physically sabotage industrial equipment at Iran’s Natanz facility | Science & Technology | details |
| June 18, 2010 | Toy Story 3 released — Pixar’s animated sequel opens, grossing $1.067 billion worldwide to become the highest-grossing film of 2010 and the first animated feature to surpass $1 billion | Arts & Culture | details |
| June 21, 2010 | iOS 4 released — Apple ships iOS 4, the first version dropping the “iPhone OS” name, adding multitasking and app folders; later point releases add Game Center, AirPlay and AirPrint atop an App Store nearing 300,000 apps | Science & Technology | details |
| June 24, 2010 | iPhone 4 launched — Apple releases the iPhone 4 with its 326 ppi Retina display, glass-and-steel design, front-facing camera, and FaceTime, selling 1.7 million units in the first weekend | Science & Technology | details |
| June 24, 2010 | Julia Gillard becomes Australia’s first female prime minister — Gillard replaces Kevin Rudd as Labor leader in an internal party challenge and is sworn in as Australia’s 27th prime minister, the first woman to hold the office | People | details |
| June 27, 2010 | Vuvuzela phenomenon at the World Cup — the South African plastic horn’s constant ~127-decibel drone dominates the tournament’s broadcasts, prompting a FIFA ban debate and a global argument over cultural authenticity in world sport | Arts & Culture | details |
| June 29, 2010 | Tesla IPO — Tesla Motors debuts on the NASDAQ at $17 a share, raising about $226 million and closing 40.5% higher, the first US automaker IPO since Ford in 1956 and a milestone that legitimized electric vehicles as an investment category | Science & Technology | details |
| July 8, 2010 | LeBron James’ “The Decision” — NBA star LeBron James announces on a live ESPN special that he will sign with the Miami Heat, inaugurating the league’s modern player-empowerment superteam era | People | details |
| July 13, 2010 | Android 2.2 Froyo rolls out — Google’s Froyo update reaches handsets with a Dalvik just-in-time compiler that roughly doubles performance, plus native Wi-Fi hotspot and USB tethering, sharpening Android’s competition with iOS | Science & Technology | details |
| July 15, 2010 | Deepwater Horizon well temporarily capped — After 87 days, a temporary cap stops the flow from the Macondo well | History & Politics | details |
| July 16, 2010 | Inception released — Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction thriller opens, grossing $839 million worldwide and winning 4 Academy Awards | Arts & Culture | details |
| July 18, 2010 | Nelson Mandela’s 92nd birthday and first International Mandela Day — Mandela turns 92 as the UN observes the inaugural Nelson Mandela International Day, promoting the 67-minutes community-service pledge | People | details |
| July 21, 2010 | Dodd-Frank Act signed — Most sweeping US financial regulation reforms since the Great Depression enacted in response to the 2008 financial crisis | Society & Economics | details |
| July 27, 2010 | Pakistan floods begin — Record monsoon rainfall triggers catastrophic flooding that eventually affects ~20 million people across one-fifth of Pakistan | History & Politics | details |
| July 29, 2010 | Jersey Shore Season 2 premieres — MTV’s reality series returns to about 5.3 million viewers, a network record, cementing the show as a defining pop-culture phenomenon and a template for social-media-driven reality celebrity | Arts & Culture | details |
| July–September 2010 | Russian heat wave and wildfires — a record heat wave (44°C) and hundreds of peat and forest fires grip western Russia, causing an estimated 55,000 excess deaths and a grain-export ban that spikes global wheat prices | History & Politics | details |
| August 1, 2010 | Netflix streaming transformation — Netflix completes its pivot from DVD-by-mail to a streaming-first platform, signing roughly $1 billion in studio licensing deals as streaming usage overtakes DVD rentals and initiates the cord-cutting era | Science & Technology | details |
| August 11, 2010 | Foursquare passes 100 million check-ins — the location-based social network crosses 100 million total check-ins amid rapid 2010 growth, popularizing gamified geolocation check-ins as a mainstream mobile-social behavior | Science & Technology | details |
| August 16, 2010 | China overtakes Japan as the world’s second-largest economy — Japan’s second-quarter GDP data ($1.288 trillion) falls below China’s ($1.337 trillion), the point at which China surpasses Japan, ending Japan’s 42-year run in second place; full-year 2010 figures later confirm the change | Society & Economics | details |
| August 31, 2010 | Kepler-9 multi-planet system confirmed — NASA confirms Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c, the first multiple planets observed transiting a single sun-like star, via transit timing variations | Science & Technology | details |
| September 6, 2010 | The King’s Speech premiered — Tom Hooper’s historical drama premieres at the Telluride Film Festival; it would win four Academy Awards and become the most successful independent British film ever released | Arts & Culture | details |
| September 19, 2010 | Deepwater Horizon well permanently sealed — Macondo well permanently sealed via a relief-well “bottom kill,” 152 days after the April 20 blowout | History & Politics | details |
| September 29, 2010 | Gliese 581g discovery announced — Astronomers announce a candidate habitable-zone exoplanet 20.3 light-years away; the widely publicized claim is later disputed and reclassified as unconfirmed | Science & Technology | details |
| October 1, 2010 | Haitian cholera epidemic begins — a cholera outbreak strikes earthquake-battered Haiti, spreading down the Artibonite River and eventually killing about 10,000 people and infecting over 800,000; genetic and epidemiological studies trace the strain to a UN peacekeeping base | History & Politics | details |
| October 1, 2010 | The Social Network released — David Fincher’s film about Facebook’s founding opens; wins 3 Academy Awards and grosses $225 million | Arts & Culture | details |
| October 5, 2010 | Graphene wins the Nobel Prize in Physics — Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester are awarded the physics Nobel for their 2004 isolation of graphene, launching two-dimensional materials science | Science & Technology | details |
| October 5, 2010 | André Geim and Konstantin Novoselov honoured as graphene pioneers — the Nobel citation credits the Manchester physicists’ “groundbreaking experiments” on the two-dimensional carbon; at 36 Novoselov is the youngest physics laureate since 1973 | People | details |
| October 6, 2010 | 2010 Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Chemistry — Robert Edwards wins the Physiology or Medicine prize for developing in vitro fertilization (announced October 4), and Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki share the Chemistry prize for palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling (October 6) | Science & Technology | details |
| October 6, 2010 | Instagram launched — Photo-sharing app launches on iOS, reaching 1 million users within roughly two months and pioneering the mobile-first social media era | Science & Technology | details |
| October 7, 2010 | Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa — the Swedish Academy honors the Peruvian-Spanish novelist “for his cartography of the structures of power,” the first Peruvian laureate and the first Latin American winner since Octavio Paz in 1990 | Arts & Culture | details |
| October 8, 2010 | Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel Peace Prize — the imprisoned Chinese dissident and Charter 08 author is awarded the prize; Beijing censors coverage and detains his wife, and his chair sits empty at the December ceremony | People | details |
| October 13, 2010 | Chilean mining rescue — All 33 trapped miners rescued alive after 69 days underground at the San José Mine | History & Politics | details |
| October 21, 2010 | Windows Phone 7 launched — Microsoft releases Windows Phone 7 worldwide, abandoning Windows Mobile for the tile-based Metro design language; the US release follows on November 8 | Science & Technology | details |
| October 26, 2010 | Mount Merapi eruption — Indonesia’s most active volcano begins a weeks-long explosive eruption near Yogyakarta, killing at least 346 people and displacing more than a million in its largest eruption since 1872 | History & Politics | details |
| November 2, 2010 | 2010 US midterm elections — Republicans gain 63 House seats, the largest swing since 1948, retaking the chamber; the Tea Party movement reshapes the decade’s politics | History & Politics | details |
| November 4, 2010 | Microsoft Kinect launched — Microsoft releases the controller-free Kinect motion sensor for Xbox 360, which sets a Guinness record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device (8 million units in 60 days) | Science & Technology | details |
| November 13, 2010 | Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest — Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader freed after roughly 15 years of detention, days after the junta’s first multiparty elections in 20 years | People | details |
| November 14, 2010 | Sebastian Vettel becomes Formula One’s youngest world champion — winning the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the 23-year-old Red Bull driver takes his first drivers’ title by four points over Fernando Alonso, the youngest champion in the sport’s history | People | details |
| November 15, 2010 | Airbnb Series A funding — Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital co-lead a $7.2 million round at a $70 million valuation, giving the venture-backed sharing economy its first major institutional endorsement | Society & Economics | details |
| November 28, 2010 | WikiLeaks releases diplomatic cables — WikiLeaks publishes 251,287 classified US State Department cables in major intelligence disclosure | History & Politics | details |
| November 28, 2010 | Julian Assange and WikiLeaks — the Cablegate release brings WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to global prominence; he surrenders to London police on December 7, opening a decade-long legal battle | People | details |
| December 3, 2010 | Black Swan released — Darren Aronofsky’s psychological ballet thriller, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 1, opens in US theaters and goes on to win Natalie Portman the Academy Award for Best Actress | Arts & Culture | details |
| December 5, 2010 | Verizon launches 4G LTE network — Verizon Wireless switches on the first major US Long Term Evolution network across 38 cities and 60-plus airports, delivering roughly tenfold 3G download speeds and beginning the mobile-broadband era | Science & Technology | details |
| December 6, 2010 | Lionel Messi named 2010 FIFA Ballon d’Or finalist — Messi heads an all-Barcelona three-man shortlist with Andrés Iniesta and Xavi; he wins the inaugural merged award at the January 10, 2011 ceremony in Zürich | People | details |
| December 8, 2010 | SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon COTS Demo 1 — SpaceX launches Dragon on a Falcon 9 and recovers it after two orbits, becoming the first private company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft and opening the commercial-spaceflight era | Science & Technology | details |
| December 10, 2010 | Comet Elenin discovered — Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin discovers the long-period comet C/2010 X1 using remotely operated robotic telescopes in New Mexico, showcasing the automated survey networks reshaping near-Earth object discovery | Science & Technology | details |
| December 17, 2010 | Arab Spring begins — Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution begins, setting off a wave of uprisings across the Arab world | History & Politics | details |
| December 17, 2010 | Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolation — Tunisian street vendor’s protest in Sidi Bouzid becomes the catalyst of the Arab Spring | People | details |
| December 21, 2010 | FCC adopts the 2010 Open Internet Order — the US Federal Communications Commission approves its first enforceable net-neutrality rules (transparency, no blocking, no unreasonable discrimination) in a 3–2 vote, opening a decade of legal battles over broadband regulation | Society & Economics | details |