2011 in science
overview of natural science-related events during the year of 2011
The year 2011 involved many significant scientific events, including the first artificial organ transplant, the launch of China's first space station and the growth of the world population to seven billion. The year saw a total of 78 successful orbital spaceflights, as well as numerous advances in fields such as electronics, medicine, genetics, climatology and robotics.
2011 was declared the International Year of Forests and Chemistry by the United Nations.
Events, discoveries and inventions
January
3 January – American pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson announces a partnership for the development of a test for the detection of metastatic cancer in the bloodstream.
5 January
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania find that a major cause of baldness may be related to the inability of some stem cells to grow into full-sized hair follicles.
An engineer from the University of Missouri announces his ambition to create a flexible solar sheet of small nano-antennas, capable of capturing solar energy with 90% efficiency; this would mark a significant improvement over contemporary commercial solar panels, which have an average efficiency of around 20%.
6 January – The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychological Association, announces that it will shortly publish a paper presenting strong evidence of ESP, the ability to sense future events.
11 January – Kepler-10b, the first confirmed small rocky exoplanet, is discovered in the Draco constellation using NASA's Kepler space telescope.
12 January – Researchers announce that salty junk food can damage arteries in as little as thirty minutes after being eaten.
14 January – A study conducted at the Innsbruck Medical University in Austria reveals that stainless steel or titanium tongue piercings harbor more bacteria than plastic piercings.
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This entry incorporates text from “2011 in science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.