[Historical report created from Science submission:]

"An evaporative cooling strategy that uses a two-component Fermi gas was employed to cool a magnetically trapped gas of 7 × 10^{5 40}K atoms to 0.5 of the Fermi temperature T_F. In this temperature regime, where the state occupation at the lowest energies has increased from essentially zero at high temperatures to nearly 60 percent, quantum degeneracy was observed as a barrier to evaporative cooling and as a modification of the thermodynamics. Measurements of the momentum distribution and the total energy of the confined Fermi gas directly revealed the quantum statistics."

[Received by Science 19 July 1999]
Science, Vol 285, Issue 5434, 1703-1706, 10 September 1999