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]

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.

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.^[3]

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

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 19 – Yevgeny Khrunov (b. 1933), cosmonaut
June 14 – Elsie Widdowson (b. 1908), nutritionist
July 8 – W. David Kingery (b. 1926), materials scientist specializing in ceramic materials
September 20 – Gherman Titov (b. 1935), cosmonaut
October 4 – Michael Smith (b. 1932), 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