Science and technology in Romania

On May 14, 1981 Romania became the 11th country in the world to have an astronaut in space. That astronaut, Dumitru Prunariu is today's president of Romanian Space Agency.On March 18, 1906 Traian Vuia became the first person to have flown a self-propelling, heavier-than-air aircraft - he is also only the second person to have taken off with a powered airplane. [ [http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/vuia.html Hargrave - The Pioneers: An Anthology: Traian Vuia (1872-1950)] ] His flight was performed in Montesson near Paris and was about 12 meters long. [ [http://www.earlyaviators.com/evuia.htm Traian I. Vuia at earlyaviators.com] ] Henri Coandă was another Romanian inventor and pioneer of aviation. He built the world's first jet powered aircraft, the Coanda-1910, [ [http://airminded.org/2005/10/07/jet-aircraft-of-the-belle-epoque/ Jet aircraft of the Belle Époque] ] and brought it at the Second International Aeronautical Exhibition in Paris around October 1910.

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Coanda-1910, world's first jet-propelled aircraft built by Henri Coanda]

George Emil Palade is a Romanian-born cell biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 [ [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1974/palade-autobio.html George E. Palade - The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1974 at Nobelprize.org] ] for his study of internal organization of such cell structures as mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and for the discovery of the ribosomes. [Nicole Kresge, Robert D. Simoni, and Robert L. Hill [http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/full/280/22/e19 George Emil Palade: How Sucrose and Electron Microscopy Led to the Birth of Cell Biology] "J. Biol. Chem.", Vol. 280, Issue 22, 19, June 3, 2005] He also won the National Medal of Science in 1986.

At the beginning of the 2000s, there was a boom in Romania in the number of computer programmers. Romania is reported to be among the countries with the highest number of computer programmers in the world. [Citation|last=Townsend|first=Eileen|title =Global IT IQ Report|publisher =Brainbench, Inc.|year =2002|url =http://www.brainbench.com/pdf/globalitiq.pdf] Some examples of successful software include RAV (Romanian AntiVirus) which was bought in 2003 by Microsoft for use in their development of Windows Defender; [ [http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Jun03/06-10GeCadPR.mspx Microsoft to Acquire Antivirus Technology From GeCAD Software] ] or BitDefender which is considered the number one antivirus software and internet security software at TopTenReviews. [ [http://internet-security-suite-review.toptenreviews.com/ 2008 Internet Security Suite Report] ]

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