Ten Scientific Discoveries We Could Not Live Without

1. Purification For people without access to this, there were more deaths last year than were caused by war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined.
3. Discovered in the 1860s, we rely on an understanding of this for such diverse things as paternity testing, criminal investigations, food production and medical research.
5. Another naturally occurring element that was harnessed as a tool around 790,000 years ago.
9. Pioneered by English physician Edward Jenner in 1796, this breakthrough makes a huge difference to human survival.
10. This is wide variety of manmade polymers, or long chains of molecules strung together, the first of which was Bakelite, invented in the early twentieth century.

2. Contemporary civilization, from standing militaries to factories to shopping malls, would be impractical without this means of production which can guarantee an excess.
4. Discovered in the late 1920s by a London physician named Dr. Alexander Fleming.
6. Humans have known about this for thousands of years, but it took research from Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s and Michael Faraday in the 1800s before humans could harness it.
7. preservation This process enables people to survive natural and man-made disasters, as well as increasing the availability of food products globally.
8. First used in Mesopotamian clay works around 3500BCE, it took at least three hundred years for its transport properties to be realised.