A person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the white paper describing Bitcoin, the first decentralised cryptocurrency.
Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone, accelerating the era of touchscreen smartphones.
Vietnam becomes the 150th member of the World Trade Organization.
Mark Zuckerberg and fellow students launch the social network Facebook at Harvard; it later reaches billions of users.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier show how CRISPR-Cas9 can cut DNA at chosen sites, launching a revolution in gene editing.
CERN announces that the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have observed a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The Human Genome Project announces it has sequenced the vast majority of the human genome.