The counting game :D

[AmericanCrafter]

[ShadyVale]

2002...

Feb 19th - NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey space probe begins to map the surface of Mars using its thermal emission imaging system.
Mar 1st - The Envisat environmental satellite is launched, with its purpose being the recording of information on environmental change.
Jun 6th - An object with an estimated diameter of 10 meters collides with Earth over the Mediterranean and detonates in mid-air.
Jun 10th - The first direct electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans is carried out by Kevin Warwick in the U.K.
Sep 25th - The Vitim event, a possible bolide impact, occurs in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia.
Nov 25th - U.S. Pres.George W. Bush signs the Homeland Security Act into law, establishing the Department of Homeland Security, in the largest U.S. government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.

[AmericanCrafter]

2003

January 22 – The last signal from NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft is received, some 7.6 billion miles from Earth.
February 4 – The leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia reconstitute the country into a loose state-union between Montenegro and Serbia, marking an end to the 85 year old Yugoslav state.
February 15 – Millions of people worldwide take part in massive anti-war protests before the United States and its allies invade Iraq.
March 20 – The Iraq War begins with the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and allied forces.
April 9 – U.S. forces seize control of Baghdad, ending the regime of Saddam Hussein
April 14 – The Human Genome Project is completed, with 99% of the human genome sequenced to 99.99% accuracy
May 23 – Dewey, the first deer cloned by scientists at Texas A&M University, is born.
May 28 – Prometea, the first horse cloned by Italian scientists, is born.
July 5 – Severe acute respiratory syndrome is declared to be contained by the World Health Organization.
August 27 - Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in over 60,000 years.
September 4 – Europe's busiest shopping centre, the Bull Ring in Birmingham, is officially opened.
December 29 – The last known speaker of the Akkala Sami language dies, rendering it extinct.

[ShadyVale]

2004...

Feb 4th - Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site Facebook.
Jun 21st - In Mojave, California, SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.
Aug 3rd - NASA's unmanned MESSENGER spacecraft is launched, with its primary mission being the study of Mercury.
Aug 22nd - Armed robbers steal Edvard Munch's The Scream, Madonna, and other paintings from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.
Nov 13th - The European Space Agency unmanned probe SMART-1 arrives at the Moon, becoming the first European satellite to fly to the Moon and orbit it.
Nov 16th - NASA's hypersonic Scramjet breaks a record by reaching a velocity of about 7,000 mph (Mach 9.6) in an unmanned experimental flight.
Dec 27th - Astrophysicists from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich measure the strongest burst from a magnetar. At 21:30:26 UT Earth is hit by a huge wave front of gamma and X-rays. It is the strongest flux of high-energetic gamma radiation measured so far.
Dec 31st - Taipei 101, at the time the tallest skyscraper in the world, standing at a height of 1,670 feet (510 m), officially opens.

[AmericanCrafter]

2005...

January 5 – Eris, the most massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System, is discovered by a team led by Michael E. Brown using images originally taken on October 21, 2003, at the Palomar Observatory.
January 12 – Deep Impact is launched from Cape Canaveral with the purpose of studying the comet Tempel 1.
January 14 – The Huygens spacecraft lands on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
January 20 – George W. Bush is inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States.
February 10 – North Korea announces that it possesses nuclear weapons as a protection against the hostility it feels from the United States.
April 23 – The first ever YouTube video is uploaded, titled Me at the zoo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
August 29 – Hurricane Katrina makes landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast, causing severe damage and killing over a thousand people and dealing an estimated $108 billion in damage.
October 24 – Hurricane Wilma made landfall near Cape Romano.
December 31 – Another second is added, 23:59:60, to end the year 2005, the first time since 1998.

[ShadyVale]

2006...

Jan 1st - Russia cuts the shipment of natural gas to Ukraine over a price dispute.
Jan 15th - NASA's Stardust mission successfully ends, the first to return dust from a comet.
Jan 19th - NASA launches the first space mission to Pluto as a rocket hurls the New Horizons spacecraft on a nine-year journey.
Jan 25th - The Walt Disney Company buys Pixar Animation Studios from Lucasfilm Ltd. for $7.4 billion and now Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Pictures.
Mar 9th - NASA's Cassini–Huygens spacecraft discovers geysers of a liquid substance shooting from Saturn's moon Enceladus, signaling a possible presence of water.
Mar 10th - NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter enters orbit around Mars.
Mar 28th - A scramjet jet engine, HyShot III, designed to fly at seven times the speed of sound, is successfully tested at Woomera, South Australia.
May 17th - The Human Genome Project publishes the last chromosome sequence, in Nature journal.
Jun 28th - The United States Armed Forces withdraws its forces in Iceland, thereby disbanding the Iceland Defense Force.
Aug 24th - The International Astronomical Union defines 'planet' at its 26th General Assembly, demoting Pluto to the status of dwarf planet more than 70 years after its discovery.
Oct 9th - North Korea claims to have conducted its first-ever nuclear test.
Nov 2nd - No. 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock becomes the most expensive painting after it is sold privately for $140 million.
Nov 5th - Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death by hanging by the Iraqi Special Tribunal.

[AmericanCrafter]

2007...

January 4 – Congress elected Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House in U.S. history.
February 13 – North Korea agrees to shut down its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon by April 14 as a first step towards complete denuclearization, receiving in return energy aid equivalent to 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.
March 1 – The fourth International Polar Year, a $1.73 billion research program to study both the North Pole and South Pole, is launched in Paris.
June 5 – NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes its second fly-by of Venus en route to Mercury.
June 29 – The iPhone, the first modern smartphone, is released in the United States.
July 7 – Live Earth Concerts are held in nine major cities around the world to raise environmental awareness.
August 4 – The Phoenix spacecraft is launched toward Mars to study its north pole.
September 13 – The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
December 20 – The Pablo Picasso painting Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, together with Candido Portinari's O Lavrador de Café, is stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art.

[ShadyVale]

2008...

Jan 14th - At 19:04:39 UTC, the unmanned MESSENGER space probe is at its closest approach during its first flyby of the planet Mercury.
Jan 21st - Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a U.S. recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.
Feb 4th - Iran opens its first space center and launches a rocket into space.
Mar 9th - The first European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicle, a cargo spacecraft for the ISS, launches from Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.
Apr 22nd - Surgeons at London's Moorfields Eye Hospital perform the first successful operations using bionic eyes, implanting them into two blind patients.
May 25th - NASA's unmanned Phoenix spacecraft becomes the first to land on the northern polar region of Mars.
Jun 11th - The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is launched.
Sep 10th - The proton beam is circulated for the first time in the Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, near Geneva, under the Franco-Swiss border.
Sep 28th - SpaceX Falcon 1 becomes the world's first privately developed space launch vehicle to successfully make orbit.
Sep 29th - Following the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 777.68 points, hitherto the largest single-day point loss in its history.
Oct 3rd - Global financial crisis: U.S. Pres. George W. Bush signs the revised Emergency Economic Stabilization Act into law, creating a 700 billion dollar Treasury fund to purchase failing bank assets.
Oct 7th - Spotify music streaming service is launched in Sweden.
Oct 21st - The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is officially inaugurated at Geneva.
Oct 22nd - The Indian Space Research Organisation successfully launches the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft on a lunar exploration mission.
Dec 8th - Human remains found in 1991 are identified as Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, using DNA analysis.

[AmericanCrafter]

2009

The only important thing to happen that year:
May 17, 2009

[ShadyVale]

2010...

Jan 4th - The tallest man-made structure to date, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is officially opened.
Feb 3rd - The sculpture L'Homme qui marche I by Alberto Giacometti sells in London for £65 million (US$103.7 million), setting a new world record for a work of art sold at auction.
Apr 20th - The Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers. The resulting Horizon oil spill, one of the largest in history, spreads for several months, damaging the waters and the U.S. coastline, and prompting international debate and doubt about the practice and procedures of offshore drilling.
Apr 27th - Standard & Poor's downgrades Greece's sovereign credit rating to junk 4 days after the activation of a €45-billion EU–IMF bailout, triggering the decline of stock markets worldwide and of the euro's value, and furthering a European sovereign debt crisis.
May 2nd - The eurozone and the International Monetary Fund agree to a €110 billion bailout package for Greece. The package involves sharp Greek austerity measures.
May 4th - Nude, Green Leaves and Bust by Pablo Picasso sells in New York for US$106.5 million, setting another new world record for a work of art sold at auction.
May 6th - The 2010 Flash Crash, a trillion-dollar stock market crash, occurs over 36 minutes, initiated by a series of automated trading programs in a feedback loop.
May 20th - Scientists announced that they have created a functional synthetic genome.
May 20th - Five paintings worth €100 million are stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Jul 8th - The first 24-hour flight by a solar-powered plane is completed by the Solar Impulse.
Sep 30th - Germany pays war reparations for World War I.
Oct 22nd - The ISS surpasses the record for the longest continuous human occupation of space, having been continuously inhabited since November 2, 2000 (3641 days).
Nov 17th - Researchers at CERN trap 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second, marking the first time in history that humans have trapped antimatter.
Nov 29th - The European Union agree to an €85 billion rescue deal for Ireland from the European Financial Stability Facility, the International Monetary Fund and bilateral loans from the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden.
Dec 21st - The first total lunar eclipse to occur on the day of the Northern winter solstice and Southern summer solstice since 1638 takes place.