Okay, here's the benchmark: We're supposed to have doubled human knowledge since this was published. Quick summary:
- A team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, led by S. George Djorgovski, may have glimpsed the dawn of our universe. In Aug. 2001, this team reported that it had spotted the “cosmic renaissance,” the era when the first starlight shone through the cosmos.
- The skeleton of a new species of titanosaur, a common type of plant-eating sauropod, was found in Madagascar in July 2001 by American scientists Catherine Forster and Kristina Curry Rogers. The titanosaur is one of the least understood dinosaurs, though its fossils have been found on nearly every continent.
- Paleontologists from the “DinoNose Project” have confounded a couple of centuries' worth of thinking about the location of dinosaurs' noses. Since the 19th century, artists' renderings—based on paleontologists' conceptions—have shown the nostrils drawn on the top of some dinosaurs' heads. This position was thought to be accurate for semi-aquatic dinosaurs such as Diplodocus, but recent findings maintain that the nostrils for both aquatic and land-locked lizards are in fact right above the mouth
- In June 2001, Intel Corporation researchers, led by Dr. Robert Chau, announced that they had created the technology needed to produce the world's smallest and fastest silicon transistor on a mass scale. With these diminutive gatekeepers of electronic current, switching on and off 1.5 trillion times a second, microprocessors could complete a billion calculations in the time it takes a person to blink. And these transistors run at speeds of nearly 20 gigahertz—just a year ago the top speed of a transistor was one gigahertz, which was considered absolutely breathtaking.
- Plant biologists Eduardo Blumwald of the University of California at Davis and Hong-Xia Zhang of the University of Toronto have developed a tomato plant with a salt-tolerant gene. This new plant is important because it can grow successfully in soil irrigated, and often ruined, by salty water.
- Results published in the Aug. 2001 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance show that doing several tasks at once—multitasking—may diminish the productivity with which any of the tasks is performed.
- In March 2001, fertility doctors Severino Antinori of Italy and Panayiotis Zavos of the U.S. announced to a symposium of international fertility experts in Rome that they planned to begin reproducing human beings through cloning in Oct. 2001.
- On July 2, 2001, fifty-nine-year-old Robert Tools became the first person to be equipped with a self-contained artificial heart.
- Following lightning-fast FDA approval in May 2001, a new form of targeted cancer therapy known as Gleevec (formerly ST1-571) may become available by the end of 2001. During a three-year study, Gleevec was used successfully to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), an adult cancer of the white blood cells. Gleevec, which is taken in pill form, targets an abnormal cancer-causing protein called BCR-ABL.
If we have doubled human knowledge since then, sing hallelujah!
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