Graphene is a layer of carbon just one atom thick, extremely strong and conductive. In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated it by peeling layers off graphite, the stuff in pencil leads, using ordinary sticky tape. They won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Ten years earlier, Geim had received an Ig Nobel, the prize for quirky research, for levitating a frog.
In 1843, inventor Alexander Bain patented a way to send images over telegraph wires using synchronized pendulums. By the 1860s, a commercial fax service was already linking cities. The telephone wasn't patented until 1876, more than three decades after that first fax patent. The fax is really a child of the telegraph age.
On 8 October 1958, in Stockholm, 43-year-old Arne Larsson received the very first implanted pacemaker. The device, designed by engineer Rune Elmqvist and implanted by surgeon Åke Senning, worked for only a few hours and had to be replaced. Larsson went on to receive more than twenty pacemakers in his lifetime. He died in 2001 aged 86, outliving both the engineer and the surgeon.