The liquefaction of oxygen was announced by Raoul Pierre Pictet (1846-1929), a Swiss chemist and physicist, by sending a telegram to the French Academy: Oxygen liquefied today under 320-atm and 140 degrees of cold by combined use of sulfurous and carbonic acid. French physicist Louis Cailletet made a similar announcement two days later. Pictet's early interest was in ice-making machines. Later, he studied extremely low temperatures and the liquefaction of gases. Both Pictet and Cailletet used both cooling and compression to liquefy oxygen but they achieved this using different techniques. Pictet's method had an advantage in that produced the liquid gas in greater quantity and was easier to apply to other gases.

An independent inquiry into the BSE "disaster" and the devastation it wreaked on British farming has been announced by the government. Included in the Inquiry will be report on the origins and the way in which authorities responded to it and the development of its human equivalent Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, CJD. The results of the inquiry published in October 2000 included Poor enforcement of the 1989 ban on specified bovine offal (brain, spinal cord and other tissue) The government at the time played down the links between BSE-infected beef and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) The government at the time misled the public about the risks posed by so-called mad cow disease.