97 Fun Facts About 21st Century

Why do purists say the 21st century began in 2001 rather than 2000?

The calendar has no year zero. It runs straight from 1 BC to AD 1, so the first century only ended with the year 100, and every century since has ended on a '00' year, not begun on one.

Roughly how many people were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks?

Nearly 3,000. Of the 2,977 victims, 40 were aboard Flight 93, whose passengers fought the hijackers; the plane came down in a Pennsylvania field, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington.

In 2001 Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, paying a reported $20 million to visit which destination?

The International Space Station. His first deal was for a trip to Russia's Mir, which fell through when the ageing station was scrapped, and NASA then advised against flying him at all.

Wikipedia, launched in January 2001, takes the 'wiki' in its name from which language's word for 'quick'?

Hawaiian. Programmer Ward Cunningham, who built the first wiki in 1995, learned the word when a Honolulu airport agent sent him to the 'wiki wiki' bus that ran between terminals.

Which large EU economy kept its own currency when euro cash arrived in 2002?

Britain. It had secured an opt-out when the single currency was agreed at Maastricht in 1992, so the pound stayed while the mark, the lira and the peseta were withdrawn.

Which airline operated Concorde's last commercial flight, on 24 October 2003?

British Airways. Air France had retired its Concordes that May, and when Richard Branson offered to buy BA's for £1 to keep them flying with Virgin, BA said they were not for sale.

Who unveiled the Human Genome Project's first draft with Tony Blair?

Bill Clinton. In June 2000 he called the draft 'the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind', with the heads of the rival public and private sequencing teams beside him.

The 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami was centred off the coast of which country?

Indonesia. The quake struck off Sumatra, and unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning network to alert the coasts in its path; one was up and running 18 months later.

Which social network, launched in February 2004, was at first open only to students at one university?

Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg coded 'thefacebook.com' in about a week, three months after Harvard's disciplinary board called him in over Facemash, his site for rating classmates' photos.

Which New Orleans stadium served as a 'shelter of last resort' for thousands of residents during Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

The Superdome. With no power or clean water, conditions inside collapsed within days, and its evacuees were bused to another stadium altogether: the Astrodome in Houston.

Which NASA probe set off for Pluto in January 2006, months before its target was reclassified as a dwarf planet?

New Horizons. It left Earth bound for the ninth planet, astronomers voted that title away seven months into the flight, and the probe flew on for nine years to reach Pluto in July 2015.

Which carrier was the exclusive US network for the first iPhone in 2007?

AT&T. Apple had signed the deal with Cingular, which took the AT&T name before launch, so American buyers had no choice of network until a Verizon iPhone arrived in February 2011.

Michael Phelps's eight golds at the 2008 Olympics beat whose record for a single Games?

Mark Spitz. His seven golds from 1972 were matched only when Phelps won the 100 m butterfly by one hundredth of a second, 50.58 to 50.59; a relay the next day brought the eighth.

Which Republican did Barack Obama defeat in the November 2008 US presidential election?

John McCain. Weeks before the vote he took the microphone from a supporter at his own rally who called Obama 'an Arab', telling the crowd his rival was 'a decent family man'.

What name did bitcoin's pseudonymous creator use when mining the 'genesis block' on 3 January 2009?

Satoshi Nakamoto. Whoever is behind the name hid a message in that first block, a headline from The Times of 3 January 2009: 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'.

Usain Bolt set the 100 m world record in 2009 in which city's Olympic Stadium?

Berlin. He ran 9.58 on the track where Jesse Owens won four golds in 1936, and the city's mayor thanked him with a painted, three-ton slab of the Berlin Wall to take home to Jamaica.

Which film became the first to gross more than $2 billion at the worldwide box office, in January 2010?

Avatar. James Cameron beat his own 12-year-old box-office record with it, and re-releases have since lifted the film's worldwide total past $2.9 billion.

In which city does the Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010, stand?

Dubai. Until opening night it was the Burj Dubai; the emirate's ruler then renamed it for Sheikh Khalifa of neighbouring Abu Dhabi, which had just lent Dubai $10 billion to cover its debts.

In which country is Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano whose 2010 ash cloud grounded flights across much of Europe?

Iceland. The eruption broke out beneath the mountain's ice cap, and meltwater flashing to steam blasted fine ash up into the jet stream; fearing damage to jet engines, regulators closed the skies.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill happened in which body of water?

Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers died in the blast and oil flowed from the seabed well for 87 days; a US court later found BP grossly negligent, and the company agreed a record-setting settlement.

The Arab Spring uprisings began in December 2010 in which country?

Tunisia: the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 sparked protests that toppled Ben Ali, then spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 in a compound in which Pakistani city?

Abbottabad. The world's most wanted man had been living about a kilometre from Pakistan's top military academy, in a quiet garrison town; the raid on his walled compound took some 40 minutes.

Which earlier disaster is the only nuclear accident besides Fukushima in 2011 to be rated Level 7, the scale's maximum?

Chernobyl. The two share the top rung although Fukushima released only a fraction as much radioactive material, one reason critics say the scale lumps very different disasters together.

Which country became the world's newest sovereign state on 9 July 2011?

South Sudan. Independence from Sudan was the prize of a deal that ended Africa's longest-running civil war, but peace did not hold: within three years the new state was fighting one of its own.

On 4 July 2012, CERN announced a new particle believed to be which long-sought boson?

Higgs. In 1964 a journal rejected Peter Higgs's paper setting out the idea, so he added a paragraph predicting a new particle and sent it elsewhere; CERN announced that particle 48 years later.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected pope on 13 March 2013, was the first pope from which religious order?

The Jesuits. Yet he named himself after the founder of another order, Francis of Assisi: as the winning votes came in, a cardinal hugged him and said, 'Don't forget the poor!'

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to which city?

Beijing. The jet never came close: radar showed it turning back west across Malaysia, and satellite signals put its last hours far to the south, over the Indian Ocean off Australia.

Who became the youngest Nobel laureate ever when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize at age 17?

Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban gunman on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley in October 2012, shared the 2014 Peace Prize with Indian children's rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.

What did LIGO detect for the first time on 14 September 2015, confirming Einstein's prediction?

Gravitational waves. They came from two black holes that collided over a billion years ago and, for an instant, radiated more power than all the stars in the visible universe combined.

What did SpaceX's Falcon 9 do in December 2015 that no orbital rocket had done before?

Landed its main stage upright. It was SpaceX's first launch since a Falcon 9 had broken apart in flight six months earlier, and the booster came back to a pad near its launch site.

Which club won the Premier League in 2016 after bookmakers had priced them as 5,000–1 outsiders?

Leicester City. A year before they went clear at the top they had been bottom of the table, seven points from safety, and only a late run of seven wins in nine games kept them up.

Which prime minister called the UK's 2016 EU referendum and resigned over the result?

David Cameron. He had promised the vote in his party's election manifesto and then urged the country to stay in; Leave won with 51.9%, and he announced he would go within hours.

Which team's 2016 World Series win ended a 108-year wait?

Chicago Cubs. Their last title had come in 1908, and they nearly missed this one: down three games to one against Cleveland, they won three straight, the last by 8–7 in the tenth inning.

Which planet-sized network of radio dishes produced the first image of a black hole, released in April 2019?

Event Horizon Telescope. It linked eight radio observatories around the globe so that they worked as one dish the size of Earth, sharp enough to show the glowing ring around galaxy M87's black hole.

Which city's Summer Olympics were postponed by a year after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020?

Tokyo. No Olympics had ever been postponed before, only cancelled, and when the Games finally opened in July 2021 they were still officially called Tokyo 2020.

For six days in March 2021 the 400-metre container ship Ever Given blocked which waterway?

The Suez Canal. A fleet of tugs and dredgers finally floated the ship off on a high tide, by which time hundreds of vessels were queuing at either end of the waterway.

Which space telescope left Earth on Christmas Day 2021, folded up inside a European Ariane 5 rocket?

Webb. Too wide for any rocket's nose cone, the James Webb telescope flew folded like origami, then opened itself out during the month-long trip to its post 1.5 million km from Earth.

Which Ukrainian territory did Russia annex in 2014, eight years before launching its full-scale invasion?

Crimea. Soldiers in uniforms without insignia seized the peninsula within three weeks in early 2014; Russia laid claim to the other three regions only after invading on 24 February 2022.

Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, after 70 years on the throne, at which royal residence?

Balmoral Castle. Two days earlier she had received Liz Truss there, the 15th and last prime minister of a reign that began with Winston Churchill, a man born 101 years before Truss.

Which company released ChatGPT in November 2022 and saw it reach an estimated 100 million users within two months?

OpenAI. Within weeks Google's managers had reportedly declared a 'code red' over the threat to their search business, and analysts said no consumer internet app had ever grown so fast.

According to the UN, world population passed which milestone on 15 November 2022?

8 billion. The UN put the growth down largely to longer lives: better public health, nutrition and medicine mean far fewer infants and mothers die, and it called the milestone a success story.

Robert Francis Prevost, elected on 8 May 2025 as Pope Leo XIV, is the first pope born in which country?

United States. Yet the Chicago-born pope gave his first address from the balcony in Italian and Spanish, with a greeting to 'my beloved Diocese of Chiclayo' in Peru, where he had been bishop.

ESA's Philae lander made the first soft landing on what, in 2014?

A comet. The harpoons meant to anchor Philae failed, so it bounced twice and came to rest in the shadow of a cliff, where its sun-starved batteries ran down within three days.

How did NASA's Cassini mission end in September 2017 after 13 years orbiting Saturn?

It dived into the planet. With its fuel almost spent, NASA steered Cassini into Saturn's atmosphere to burn up, so it could never crash into Enceladus, a moon whose hidden ocean might harbour life.

Before ending up in Moscow, Edward Snowden flew to which city in May 2013 to hand NSA documents to journalists?

Hong Kong. A month later he boarded a flight to Moscow, hoping to travel on to asylum in Latin America, and instead spent weeks stranded in the airport's transit zone before Russia took him in.

Which country made the first soft landing on the Moon's far side in January 2019?

China's Chang'e 4 touched down in the Von Kármán crater on 3 January 2019; the relay satellite Queqiao had been parked beyond the Moon first so the lander could talk to Earth.

Which company operated the Titan submersible that imploded on a dive to the Titanic in June 2023?

OceanGate. Deep-diving subs normally use a metal sphere; to seat five, the company built Titan's hull as a carbon-fibre tube despite experts' warnings, and its own chief executive died aboard.

Which social network, launched in 2006, originally limited every post to just 140 characters?

Twitter began as an internal messaging service for staff at a start-up called Odeo, and its 140-character cap held until it doubled to 280 in 2017.

Chesley Sullenberger landed a powerless airliner on which river in 2009, saving all 155 aboard?

The Hudson became a runway after a flock of Canada geese knocked out both engines just after take-off; less than four minutes passed between the bird strike and the splashdown.

In 2010, 33 miners were winched to the surface after 69 days trapped underground in which country?

Chile brought the men up one at a time from 700 metres down in a steel capsule named Fénix, which its navy's shipbuilders made with design input from NASA.

Which Swedish teenager's solo school strike outside parliament in 2018 inspired Fridays for Future?

Greta Thunberg was 15 when she sat down alone with her sign; a year later she crossed the Atlantic on a solar-panelled racing yacht to attend a UN climate summit in New York.

Which 2016 game sent players outdoors to catch virtual creatures and passed 500 million downloads?

Pokémon Go was downloaded more than 10 million times in its first week, faster than any app before it, and took in around $10 million a day that July.

Which cyclist was stripped of seven Tour de France titles in 2012 after a doping investigation?

Lance Armstrong denied doping for years, then admitted it to Oprah Winfrey in a January 2013 interview; his seven wins were never handed to other riders.

Which financier was exposed in December 2008 as the mastermind of a $65 billion Ponzi scheme?

Bernie Madoff was turned in by his own sons after he confessed the fraud to them, and a judge later gave him the maximum sentence of 150 years in prison.

Which word, first recorded on an Australian web forum in 2002, was Oxford's 2013 Word of the Year?

Selfie is a new word for an old habit: Robert Cornelius made a daguerreotype of himself in 1839, one of the first photographs of a person ever taken.

Which energy drink brand sponsored Felix Baumgartner's supersonic skydive from a balloon in 2012?

Red Bull saw its skydiver reach Mach 1.25, the first person to break the sound barrier without engine power, while millions watched a record-setting YouTube live stream.

Which street artist's painting half-shredded itself seconds after selling at auction in 2018?

Banksy had hidden a shredder in the frame of Girl with Balloon, and later said the plan was to destroy the whole canvas rather than stop halfway.

The droning vuvuzela horn was the soundtrack of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, staged in which country?

South Africa beat Egypt and Morocco to become the first African nation to host the finals, then became the first host ever knocked out in the first round.

Which Wall Street investment bank filed the largest bankruptcy in US history on 15 September 2008?

Lehman Brothers held over $600 billion in assets when it failed; rescue talks with Barclays and Bank of America came to nothing, and Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch instead.

Which website, founded by three former PayPal employees, did Google buy for $1.65 billion in 2006?

YouTube was less than two years old when it was sold, and its first clip, which is kept on the site, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.

Which space shuttle broke apart over Texas on re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts?

Columbia was doomed at launch, when a piece of insulating foam broke off the external tank and punched a hole in the heat shield on the leading edge of its left wing.

Which US city filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history on 18 July 2013?

Detroit owed an estimated $18–20 billion, far beyond the previous record of $4 billion, and the fate of its art museum's collection loomed over the case.

Which virus caused the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016 that killed more than 11,000 people?

Ebola's worst outbreak began in Guinea in December 2013, and its first known victim is thought to have been a toddler in the village of Méliandou.

Which golfer held all four men's major titles at the same time after winning the 2001 Masters?

Tiger Woods had won the US Open, the Open Championship and the PGA Championship in 2000, so the run spanned two seasons and became known as the Tiger Slam.

Who became Germany's first female chancellor in 2005 and went on to hold the office for 16 years?

Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany and earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry, working as a research scientist until 1989 before she entered politics.

Which city became the first to host the modern Olympics three times when it staged the 2012 Games?

London had already hosted in 1908 and 1948, and its 2012 Games were the first at which every sport had female competitors.

Who was sworn in as the first female vice president of the US in January 2021?

Kamala Harris had been San Francisco's district attorney, California's attorney general and a US senator before she joined the winning ticket.

Which pope resigned in February 2013, the first to step down since Gregory XII in 1415?

Benedict XVI gave his advanced age as the reason and chose to be known as pope emeritus, a title he kept until his death on the last day of 2022.

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake on 12 January 2010 devastated the capital of which Caribbean country?

Haiti's National Palace was severely damaged in the quake, which lasted less than 30 seconds and was centred about 25 km from Port-au-Prince.

Twelve young footballers and their coach were rescued from a flooded cave in which country in 2018?

Thailand's rescue drew in as many as 10,000 people, and the boys were sedated and carried out unconscious by divers through the flooded passages.

Which carmaker admitted in 2015 that 11 million of its diesel cars could cheat emissions tests?

Volkswagen's cars emitted up to 40 times more nitrogen oxides on the road than under test, in a scandal that became known as Dieselgate.

Which company began as a DVD-by-mail rental service and launched video streaming in 2007?

Netflix released House of Cards in February 2013, marketed as its first original production, after outbidding American cable networks for the series.

Which pocket music player was unveiled on 23 October 2001 with a 5 GB hard drive and a scroll wheel?

The Apple iPod went from idea to launch in less than a year, and Fortune magazine called it a Walkman for the 21st century.

Which photo-sharing app, launched in October 2010, was bought for $1 billion only 18 months later?

Instagram grew out of Burbn, a mobile check-in app, and reached one million registered users within about two months of its release.

Which American gymnast won four gold medals, including the all-around title, at the 2016 Olympics?

Simone Biles was the first woman in gymnastics to win four golds at one Games since 1984, and Team USA chose her to carry the flag at the closing ceremony.

Which quarterback won a seventh Super Bowl in February 2021, in his first season with Tampa Bay?

Tom Brady was only the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL draft and the seventh quarterback taken, which earned him a reputation as the league's biggest draft steal.

Which nickname was given to the H1N1 influenza that the WHO declared a pandemic in June 2009?

Swine flu got its name because the new strain mixed bird, swine and human flu viruses with a Eurasian pig flu virus, though nobody could catch it from eating pork.

Which leader, in power since a 1969 coup, was overthrown and killed by rebel forces in October 2011?

Muammar Gaddafi fled to his hometown of Sirte, where rebel fighters found him hiding in drainage pipes at a construction site.

Which group captured Kabul on 15 August 2021 as US troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan?

The Taliban command first ordered its forces to halt at the gates of the city, declaring it would not be taken by force; the last US troops flew out on 30 August.

Which eurozone country needed three international bailouts, in 2010, 2012 and 2015, to stay afloat?

Greece became the first developed country to miss an IMF repayment on time, paying 20 days late in a summer when its banks shut for several weeks.

Which energy company's December 2001 bankruptcy also destroyed its auditor, Arthur Andersen?

Enron had been rated America's most innovative large company by Fortune magazine, and its fall led to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act and tougher penalties for corporate fraud.

Which block-building game created by Markus Persson did Microsoft buy for $2.5 billion in 2014?

Minecraft was written in Java by its creator, known as Notch, after he left a job at the games firm King in 2009; he handed over development at its full release.

Which country issued a 100 trillion dollar banknote before abandoning its own currency in 2009?

Zimbabwe's inflation peaked at an estimated 89.7 sextillion percent a year in November 2008, and its 100 trillion dollar note ended up unable to cover a bus fare.

Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island tortoise, died in June 2012 in which island group?

The Galápagos lost a whole subspecies with him: found on Pinta in 1971 and moved to a research station for his own safety, he was known in his last years as the rarest creature in the world.

Which double-deck jet entered service in October 2007 as the world's largest passenger airliner?

The Airbus A380 typically seats 525 but is certified for 853, and in its evacuation test that many passengers got out of a darkened cabin in 78 seconds.

Who was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012 while Vladimir Putin served as prime minister?

Dmitry Medvedev had chaired the board of the gas giant Gazprom from 2000, and when his single term ended he became prime minister himself, serving until 2020.

In which church were King Charles III and Queen Camilla crowned on Saturday 6 May 2023?

Westminster Abbey has staged coronations since William the Conqueror's in 1066, and Charles III became the 40th reigning monarch to be crowned there.

Which country's Chandrayaan-3 made the first soft landing near the Moon's south pole in August 2023?

India's space agency became only the fourth to land on the Moon, four years after its previous lander had crashed on the way down.

Which single-layer form of carbon did two Manchester physicists isolate in 2004 using adhesive tape?

Graphene was peeled from a lump of graphite with ordinary sticky tape, and the experiments won Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Which DeepMind program won four of five games against board-game champion Lee Sedol in March 2016?

AlphaGo was the first computer program to beat a 9-dan Go professional without a handicap, and its opponent's only win came in the fourth game.

Which Balkan territory declared independence in February 2008, a move Serbia called illegal?

Kosovo's declaration was adopted by 109 of the 120 members of its assembly in Pristina, and at Serbia's request the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice for an opinion on it.

Which former pulp mill became the world's largest mobile phone maker for a decade from 1998?

Nokia had long been associated with rubber and cables before it made handsets, and in 2014 it sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft.

Which NASA probe, launched in 1977, became the first craft to enter interstellar space in 2012?

Voyager 1 had flown past Jupiter and Saturn decades earlier, and in 1990 it took the family portrait of the Solar System that includes the Pale Blue Dot image of Earth.

Which runner became the first to cover the marathon distance in under two hours, in Vienna in 2019?

Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 over laps of an avenue in the Prater park, helped by a pace car and 41 rotating pacemakers, aids that record rules do not allow.

Which Southeast Asian country became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century in May 2002?

East Timor, officially Timor-Leste, had been a Portuguese colony until 1975 and belongs to the Community of Portuguese Language Countries.

Which skyscraper, opened on 31 December 2004, was the world's tallest building until the Burj Khalifa overtook it?

Taipei 101 steadies itself against the wind with a 660-tonne steel pendulum, and its lifts were the fastest in the world when it was completed.

Which company, co-founded by Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, developed a COVID-19 vaccine with Pfizer?

BioNTech's shot was the first approved mRNA vaccine; the Mainz firm and its US partner had first teamed up in 2018 to work on flu vaccines.