Gary Locke was inaugurated as governor of Washington, the first Chinese American governor in US history and the first Asian American governor of a mainland state.
Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu announced experimental proof that nature violates 'conservation of parity,' overturning a basic assumption of physics; her Columbia colleagues Lee and Yang won the Nobel, but Wu-later the first woman to lead the American Physical Society-did not. (Shares Jan 15 with Gary Locke's governorship.)