The Winter Olympics are held in Lake Placid, N.Y. with East Germany coming in first in the medal count, followed by the Soviet Union. and the United States. The Summer Olympics are held in Moscow, but are boycotted by several countries, including the United States for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Mt. St. Helens, a volcano in Washington state, erupts and continues to erupt intermittently throughout the year. Also that year:

• Ronald Reagan and George Bush are elected president and vice president, respectively, on the Republican ticket.

• Leonardo Da Vinci’s 36-page notebook of drawings and writings, known as the Codex Leicester, is sold at Christie’s in London for $5.28 million, the highest auction price ever paid for a manuscript. The buyer, Armand Hammer says he will bequeath the Codex to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Technicians finish cleaning the damaged nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. The radiation level is deemed acceptable and residents are permitted to return to the area.

• Experiments by U.S. scientists indicate the subatomic particle known as the neutrino appears to have mass, helping explain how the galaxies are held together by gravity.

• Aegyptopithecus is found to be the oldest known ancestor of both man and apes after an examination of primate fossils found at the edge of the Sahara Desert in Egypt.