What was thought impossible

Today, space travel has opened up to commercial interests, with paying space tourists and an international space station, while countries such as India, China, and Japan have all established their own space agencies.

Research into the creation of more efficient and comfortable space travel for astronauts has also led to terrestrial innovations in footwear, medical devices, water filtration and, of course, writing upside-down.

Computational aids, such as the abacus, were used for thousands of years before anyone dreamed of modern-day personal computers and supercomputers. After work by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 19th century led many to recognize that machines were capable of algorithm computations, a flurry of developments in mathematical calculator devices began.

Eventually, analog computers were developed, and many people, such as Alan Turing, theorized the power of computers conducting many calculations a second. Work by both the British and Germans during World War II allowed postwar computer technology to adapt digital programming methods.

To strengthen computing power and usability, computer networks were developed in the U. The Internet , first created in , eventually led to services such as e-mail and the World Wide Web. Today, an estimated quarter of the world's population uses the Internet, and there are approximately 1 billion personal computers worldwide. In the 15th century, Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch executed a piece depicting a well-known and long-practiced medical technique called trepanning.

Designed to alleviate cranial pressure or pain, trepanning involved a surgeon cutting open a patient's skull and inserting a small metal instrument to create space in the cranial cavity. Advances in medicine in include scientists who are working to treat head and brain traumas by growing new brain cells in a laboratory and introducing them into the patient's body.

When expertly shaped, it can be used to 'mould' a model of a quantum particle system. While filming the behavior pairs of photons, Radoslaw Chrapkiewicz and Michal Jachura, two of the researchers, noticed something called two-photon interference. In two-photon interference, pairs of distinguishable photons act randomly when entering a beam splitter which divides a ray of light.

But nondistinguishable photons exhibit quantum interference, which affects their behavior. The pairs are always either transmitted or reflected together. Our analysis led us to a surprising conclusion: It turned out that when two photons exhibit quantum interference, the course of this interference depends on the shape of their wavefronts [an imaginary surface joining all adjacent points with the same phase]," Chrapkiewicz told Phys.

This experiment has huge implications for our understanding of the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, a field of physics that has been perplexing scientists for more than a century. It allows scientists to gain valuable information about the phase of a photon's wave function. The researchers hope to apply this method to create holograms of more complex quantum objects, which might have implications that stretch beyond fundamental science into real world applications.

CD and DVD burning made it possible to transport large volumes of data, almost like an early predecessor to thumb drives. When you want to see a video of something nowadays, YouTube is the first place you look. The site is the go-to location for streaming video, everything from news to videos of Miss America contestants speaking incoherently. Not only are we talking about WiFi routers that enable you to have internet anywhere in your house, but also the 3G technology that lets you use the internet on your mobile device while you're out and about.

Video production and editing is more affordable than it's ever been. Software like Final Cut Pro represents a real democratization of media production, and that's an exciting premise. Sure, VCR-programming wizards could achieve similar results with a VHS tape back in the day, but when the technology went digital, it took off. Not only can you DVR your favorite shows while you're out and about, but your TiVo will automatically record things that it thinks you'll like, based on what you've recorded in the past.

It wasn't until Apple introduced FaceTime that there was practical video chat included on a mobile device. Despite the fact that it's currently only limited to WiFi, all signs point to 3G compatibility down the road, and that's only going to make it more useful. For you. Televisions are so ubiquitous these days that you can find them in cars and on the doors of fridges. But less than a century ago, they had yet to be introduced to the world.

Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco in September , unveiled by its year-old inventor Philo Farnsworth. The young man had devised a system capable of capturing moving images in a form that could be coded onto radio waves and then transformed back into a picture on a screen. We live in a computerised world but the idea of a personal home computer was once a far-fetched notion. However the personal computer went on to find its first true commercial success when Apple introduced the Apple II.