ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses to give a taste of what is happening in science at the start of the twenty-first century, by looking at a handful of fields where especially promising advances are being made, or are anticipated in the next few years. In 2000, all eyes were on the Human Genome Project, techniques for reading off the coded information in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The rate of progress in palaeontology was accelerating as the twentieth-century closed. Astronomy is going through an exciting time, largely as a result of greatly improved telescopes, often orbiting in space. The Hubble space telescope is the most famous of these, but other instruments have also been sent into orbit to record infrared, ultraviolet and even gamma-rays. Knowledge of genetics will lead to tailor-made drugs for individual patients, or at least for individual strains of bacteria and viruses, instead of the general-purpose antibiotics and antiviral drugs of today.
