In December of 2002 President Bush launched a national smallpox inoculation program in response to fears that Iraq will use the deadly disease for biological warfare against the U.S. Training sessions, like the one shown here, began laying the foundation for the nation's response to acts of bioterrorism. President Bush was one of the first to be vaccinated.
A thornless multiflora rose branch (top) is compared to a normally thorny multiflora rose (bottom) on Nov. 21, 2002. Research by University of Illinois Professor of Horticultue Dr. Robert Skirvin and Animal Sciences Professor Emeritus Dr. Phil Dziuk led to the thornless variety. Both plants still have hips (red nubs).
In November 2002 a Tokyo-based toy manufacturer came out with "Qi," designed after their popular "Choro-Q" toy cars. The single-seater powered by two compact 0.3-kilowatt motors built in the rear wheels can go 50 miles on a battery charge. The car goes on the Japanese market for $10,840.
A full moon illuminates a windmill north of Lincoln, Neb. while a meteor pierces the night sky early Nov. 19, 2002. The celestial display was the Leonid meteor shower. The annual shower occurs when the Earth, on its yearlong orbit of the sun, passes through the trail of dust left in the wake of the comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings around the sun once every 33 years.
An empty ossuary, or limestone burial box for bones, was discovered in Israel with an Aramaic inscription reading "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." French scholar Andre Lemaire, a specialist in ancient inscriptions, published a paper in October dating the burial artifact to three decades after the crucifixion, 63 A.D. The ossuary may be the oldest archaeological evidence of Jesus Christ.
In October, the remains of four prehistoric woolly rhino were found by a quarryman in Whitemoor Haye, in Staffordshire, central England. Scientists said they will provide new clues about the Ice Age. The group is one of the best Ice Age discoveries of its type in Northern Europe in recent years.
September's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg yielded a handful of small victories and some promising new initiatives concerning economic growth and fighting poverty while protecting the environment. Here in Tokyo, scientists believe the accumulated heat from all the human activity is changing local weather patterns, akin to global warming on the scale of a single city.
The snakehead fish, which feed voraciously on other fish and can crawl short distances on land, was seen as a potential danger to the U.S. environment when it was identified in a Maryland pond over the summer. Scientists believed the 100 snakehead babies found in the pond were spawns of two snakehead adults that were illegally dumped.
The West Nile virus hit America hard in 2002, completing its march from the East Coast, where it was identified in 1999, all the way out to California. Mosquitoes carrying the virus infected more than 3,800 people, killing 225.
Jimmy Loizeua, left and James Auger are seen June 28, 2002, with their invention, a prototype "telephone tooth" that will allow mobile phone users to hear through vibrations in their tooth after the device is implanted into a molar.
A chip that can be loaded with substances to identify biological threats such as anthrax or smallpox is shown next to a dime at BioForce Nanosciences Inc., June 27, 2002, in Ames, Iowa. The private company received $200,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop a test for anthrax.
An MIR submersible, right, moves over the deck of the Bismarck, lighting an anti-aircraft gun, in "James Cameron's Expedition: Bismarck." Two MIR submersibles, owned and operated by Russia's Institute of Oceanography, were used to film the documentary of the sunken Nazi German battleship in June 2002.
On his sixth bid to circumnavigate the World solo by balloon, Chicago adventurer and commodities broker Steve Fossett succeeds. Here his balloon can be seen floating 406 miles east of Sydney, Australia, on June 21, 2002.
The B-2 Stealth Bomber, made by the Northrop Grumman Corp., is shown landing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. On June 26, 2002, the defense giant purchased TRW Inc. for $7.8 billion, making Northrop the nation's second largest defense contractor with projected annual revenues of more than $26 billion and approximately 123,000 employees.
Etchings on this 77,000 year-old ochre stone found in a seaside cave east of Cape Town, South Africa, suggest ancient humans were capable of complex behavior and abstract thought thousands of years earlier than once believed. The findings were published in January 2002 by the magazine Science.