2001 in science

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.

  Biology

• 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.

  Chemistry

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

  Computer science

• 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.

  Medicine

• July 2 – The world's first self-contained artificial heart is implanted in Robert Tools in the United States.
• Adult-onset basal ganglia disease caused by Ferritin light chain mutations is described.

  Paleontology

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

  Philosophy

Physics

• 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.

  Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Eric Allin Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, Carl E. Wieman
• * Chemistry – William S. Knowles, Ryōji Noyori, K. Barry Sharpless
• * Medicine – Leland H. Hartwell, R. Timothy Hunt, Paul M. Nurse
• Turing Award: Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Harry Blackmore Whittington

  Deaths

• February 9 – Herbert A. Simon, American polymath, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
• February 13 – Ugo Fano, Italian-born American physicist.
• February 24 – Claude Shannon, American mathematician.
• March 31 – Clifford Shull, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• May 5 – Wang Yinglai, Chinese biochemist.
• May 8 – William T. Stearn, English botanist.
• May 28 – Francisco Varela, Chilean biologist and philosopher.
• June 4 – Lu Jiaxi, Chinese physical chemist.
• June 18 – René Dumont, French agronomist.
• June 26 – John F. Yardley, American aeronautical engineer.
• August 9 – Sir Alec Skempton, English pioneer of soil science and engineering historian.
• August 15 – Kateryna Yushchenko, Ukrainian computer scientist and academic.
• August 20 – Sir Fred Hoyle, English astronomer and science fiction writer.
• August 31 – Doris Calloway , American nutritionist.
• September 2 – Christiaan Barnard, South African cardiac surgeon.
• October 31 – Warren Elliot Henry, African American physicist.
• November 30 – Robert Tools, American first recipient of a self-contained artificial heart, after 151 days without a living heart.
• December 5 – Franco Rasetti, Italian American nuclear physicist.
• December 12 – Robert Schommer, American astronomer.