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Top 10 World Science News Selected by Chinese Scientists
The completion of the draft map of the human genome came out on top of the 10 most important scientific achievements made by scientists around the world in the past year, according to a survey conducted among 485 top Chinese scientists.
The top 10 major achievements were chosen by 485 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences or Chinese Academy of Engineering from 20 options. The results of the survey were released in Beijing Thursday, January 4.
The top 10 scientific achievements for the year 2000 are as follows:
1. Scientists from the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Britain and China announced on June 26 the completion of the draft framework of the human genome, which provides important information for research on human genetic materials.
2. The International Business Machines Co. (IBM) developed a quantum computer using five atoms as processors and memory, and Princeton University developed a bio-computer using ribonucleic acid (RNA), a new breakthrough in the molecular computing field.
3. IBM announced on June 29 it has developed the fastest computer in the world, with a computing speed of up to 12.3 trillion times per second, breaking the barrier of 10 trillion times per second for the first time in the world.
4. On November 2, one astronaut from the United States and two cosmonauts from Russia, began to live and work for an unspecified period in the international Space Station, which is 350 km away from the earth. The American and the Russians were the first group to inhabit the station, a 60 billion US dollar project funded by 16 countries.
5. Scientists from the United States, Japan, Greece and the Republic of Korea discovered in the United States evidence of the existence of a neutrino of an elementary particle.
6. Scientists from the United States discovered living bacteria buried 600 meters underground, which are believed to be 250 million years old.
7. French scientists succeeded in curing the diseases of three babies with serious comprehensive immune deficiency syndrome by using gene therapy. This success was the first major gene therapy breakthrough in the past decade.
8. Scientists at Merck Co announced that they have found two materials capable of preventing the genetic material of the AIDS virus from integrating with that of human white blood cells, which represents important progress in AIDS research.
9. Scientists in Los Angeles, the United States, invented a new type of molecular switch, a major step forward in molecular computer research.
10. Scientists from Japanese company NEC and Hong Kong produced a carbon tube with a diameter of only 0.4 nanometer, the smallest stable carbon tube in the world.
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