2001 in science

The year 2001 in science and technology involved many events, some of which are included below.

Astronomy and space exploration

February 12 – The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft lands in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.
June 21 – Solar eclipse of June 21, 2001, a total eclipse.
August 8 – NASA's Genesis spacecraft is launched.
October 15 – NASA's Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter's moon Io.
November 27 – The Hubble Space Telescope detects sodium in the atmosphere of HD 209458 b, the first exoplanet atmosphere to be measured.
December 14 – Solar eclipse of December 14, 2001, an annular eclipse.

January 8 – The first animal from an endangered species produced by cloning, a gaur named Noah, is born at Trans Ova Genetics in Sioux Center, Iowa. He dies within 48 hours of a common dysentery.
January – The second animal from an endangered species produced by cloning, a European mouflon lamb, is born in Italy.
February – The publicly funded Human Genome Project, led by Francis Collins and the privately funded Celera effort, led by Craig Venter simultaneously publish their decoding of the human genome.
April 6 – Linda Partridge and colleagues publish their identification of the role of a specific gene in animal ageing.
April 19 – Pygmy three-toed sloth first described.
Craig Venter and Mark Adams complete the genetic map of the laboratory mouse.
Fossil remains of the whale Rodhocetus balochistanensis found in Balochistan province, Pakistan, by Philip D. Gingerich.

February 15 – Production of a capsule-based fibre-reinforced polymer composite self-healing material is announced.

January 9 – Apple Inc. releases the iTunes media player.
January 15 – Wikipedia launches on the internet.
May – Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues name the Semantic Web.
August 24 – Windows XP personal computer operating system released by Microsoft; it is available for retail sale on October 25.
October 23 – Apple Inc. unveil the first generation iPod portable media player.
December 1-2 – The Budapest Open Access Initiative, a public statement of principles promoting open access to research literature, is launched at a conference convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute.
December – The C# programming language specification is released.
In quantum computing, the first working 7-qubit NMR computer is demonstrated at IBM's Almaden Research Center, demonstrating Shor's algorithm.
Chatterbot Eugene Goostman is developed.
The Walkman Circ is released.

July – First fossil skull fragments of the hominid 'Toumaï' found by a team led by Michel Brunet in Chad.

Francisco-Miguel Marqués and co-workers at the Grand Accélérateur National d'Ions Lourds in Caen claim to detect a tetraneutron; reproducibility of this observation has not been possible.