1970 in science

The year 1970 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

List of years in science (table)
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Astronomy and space exploration

• February 11 – Japan becomes the fourth country to launch a satellite into orbit.
• March 31 – Explorer I reentry (after 12 years in orbit)
• April 11 – Apollo 13 ill-fated space mission launched
• April 17 – Apollo 13 returns safely to earth
• August 17 – Venera program: Venera 7 is launched. It will later becomes the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from another planet.
• November 17 – Luna program: The Soviet Union lands Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) on the Moon. This is the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world and was released by the orbiting Luna 17 spacecraft.

Biology

• Establishment of Parc naturel régional de Camargue in the south of France.

Chemistry

• August – Ulrich K. Laemmli publishes his refinement of the SDS-PAGE method.[1]

Computer science

• January 1 – Unix time begins at 00:00:00 UTC.
• June–August – FLOW (programming language) devised by Jef Raskin.
• November 17 – Douglas Engelbart receives a United States patent for the first computer mouse.[2]
• Len Deighton's 1943-set Bomber, published this year in England, is the first novel written on a word processor, the IBM MT/ST.[3]
• Xerox PARC computer laboratory opens in Palo Alto, California.
• Datapoint 2200 is announced. A mass-produced programmable terminal, designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) founders Phil Ray and Gus Roche.

Earth sciences

• January 4 – The 7.1 M_w  Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). Between 10,000–14,621 are killed and 26,783 injured.
• May 24 – Kola Superdeep Borehole drilling begins on the Kola Peninsula of Russia.

Mathematics

• Conway's Game of Life cellular automaton devised by John Horton Conway.[4]
• Mathematician Kurt Gödel allows circulation of his ontological proof of the existence of God.[5]

Medicine

• The Dubowitz Score for estimating the gestational age of babies is published by Lilly and Victor Dubowitz.[6]
• The Exeter hip replacement stem, developed by surgeon Robin Ling and engineer Clive Lee, is first implanted, at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter, England.[7]

Physics

• Prediction of the GIM mechanism, requiring the existence of a charm quark, by Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani.[8]

Psychology

• Henri Tajfel develops his minimal group paradigm, a constituent of social identity theory.
• Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume I is published by Konrad Lorenz.

Events

• June 19 – The Patent Cooperation Treaty is signed into international law, providing a unified procedure for filing patent applications to protect inventions.

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Alan Baker, Heisuke Hironaka, Sergei Novikov and John Griggs Thompson
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Hannes Alfvén, Louis Néel
  • Chemistry – Luis F. Leloir
  • Medicine – Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler, Julius Axelrod
• Turing Award – James H. Wilkinson

Births

• March 27 – Eleanor Maguire, Irish-born neuropsychologist.
• August 1 – Elon Lindenstrauss, Israeli mathematician.
• September 3 – Stanislav Smirnov, Russian-born mathematician.

Deaths

• January 5 – Max Born (b. 1882), German physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954.
• May 1 – Ralph Hartley (b. 1888), American electrical engineer.
• July 20 – Margaret Reed Lewis (b. 1881), American cell biologist.
• July 29 – Emanuel Miller (b. 1892), British child psychiatrist.
• August 1 – Otto Heinrich Warburg (b. 1883), German physiologist and winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 22 – Vojtěch Jarník (b. 1897), Czech mathematician.

References

1. Laemmli, U. K. (1970). "Cleavage of structural proteins during the assembly of the head of bacteriophage T4". Nature. 227 (5259): 680–685. doi:10.1038/227680a0. PMID 5432063.
2. U.S. Patent 3,541,541.
3. Kirschenbaum, Matthew (2013-03-01). "The Book-Writing Machine: What was the first novel ever written on a word processor?". Slate. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
4. Gardner, Martin (October 1970). Mathematical Games – The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". Scientific American. 223. pp. 120–123. ISBN 0-89454-001-7. Retrieved 2011-06-26.
5. Dawson, John W. Jr. (1997). Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel. Wellesley, Mass.: A. K. Peters Ltd. ISBN 1-56881-025-3.
6. Mercuri, Eugenio (2016-05-08). "Lilly Dubowitz obituary". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2020-06-24.
7. Timperley, A. John (2017-10-20). "Robin Ling obituary". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
8. Glashow, S. L.; Iliopoulos, J.; Maiani, L. (1970). "Weak Interactions with Lepton–Hadron Symmetry". Physical Review D. 2 (7): 1285–1292. Bibcode:1970PhRvD...2.1285G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.2.1285.