2000 in science

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The year 2000 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy and space exploration

Conjunction of planets, Moon, and Sun on May 4, 2000

May 4 – A rare astronomical conjunction occurs on the new moon including all seven of the traditional celestial bodies known from ancient times until the discovery of Uranus in 1781; this conjunction consists of the Sun and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
August 10 – Publication of the M–sigma relation in The Astrophysical Journal.

June 26 – 'Rough draft' of the human genome is announced jointly by President of the United States Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.^[1]
December 14 – The full genome sequence of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana is published in Nature.
10-year Census of Marine Life launched.^[2]
A population of the Siamese crocodile, previously believed extinct in the wild since 1992, is located in the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia.

January 1 – Year 2000 problem proves to be of little global significance.^[3]
March 4 – Sony Computer Entertainment releases the PlayStation 2 sixth generation home video game console in Japan.
March 14 – Stephen King's horror story Riding the Bullet is published in e-book format only, the world's first mass-market electronic book.
September – First system enabling the selection, automatic downloading and storage of serial episodic audio content on PCs and portable devices, origin of the podcast, is launched by early MP3 player manufacturer i2Go.^[4]^[5]

March – Iceberg B-15, with a surface area of 11,000 km² (4,200 sq mi), calves from the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica.
April – Cave of the Crystals discovered at the Naica Mine in Mexico.

January – Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg publish "The Hallmarks of Cancer".^[7]
January 31 – English doctor Harold Shipman is found guilty of killing fifteen of his elderly patients by lethal injections of diamorphine, the only British physician ever convicted of murdering his patients; he is actually considered to have killed at least 215.^[8]

First fossil of Orrorin, an early species of Homininae, discovered in the Tugen Hills of Kenya.

January 12 – Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau (b. 1910), American chemical engineer
January 19 – G. Ledyard Stebbins (b. 1906), American botanist and geneticist
March 7 – W. D. Hamilton (b. 1936), English evolutionary biologist, widely recognised as one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the 20th century
March 10 – Nim Chimpsky (b. 1973), chimpanzee
May 6 – John Clive Ward (b. 1924), English-born physicist
May 19 – Yevgeny Khrunov (b. 1933), cosmonaut
June 14 – Elsie Widdowson (b. 1908), English nutritionist
July 8 – W. David Kingery (b. 1926), American materials scientist specializing in ceramic materials
July 14 – Sir Mark Oliphant (b. 1901), Australian nuclear physicist
July 29 – René Favaloro (b. 1923), Argentine cardiac surgeon
September 20 – Gherman Titov (b. 1935), cosmonaut
October 4 – Michael Smith (b. 1932), English-born Canadian chemist, 1993 Nobel Prize winner
November 20 – Nikolay Dollezhal (b. 1899), a key figure in Soviet atomic bomb project and chief designer of nuclear reactors

^ "White House Press Release". Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved August 4, 2011.
^ "Census of Marine Life". Retrieved October 10, 2011.
^ Center for Y2K and Society Records, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
^ "I2Go eGo". Archived from the original on February 24, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.
^ Credeur, Mary Jane (September 10, 2001). "2Go is gone after burning through $7 million". Atlanta Business Chronicle.
^ Reingold, O.; Vadhan, S.; Wigderson, A. (2000), "Entropy waves, the zig-zag graph product, and new constant-degree expanders and extractors", Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), pp. 3–13, arXiv:math/0406038, doi:10.1109/SFCS.2000.892006, ISBN 0-7695-0850-2, S2CID 420651.
^ Hanahan Douglas; Weinberg Robert A. (January 2000). "The Hallmarks of Cancer". Cell. 100 (1): 57–70. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81683-9. PMID 10647931.
^ "Harold Shipman: Timeline". BBC News. July 18, 2002. Retrieved August 4, 2011.
^ Ferrandis, Joaquín (November 13, 2000). "El mayor museo de las ciencias de España" [The largest science museum of Spain]. El País (in Spanish). Madrid. Archived from the original on March 31, 2022. Retrieved March 30, 2022.