1970 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 11 – Japan becomes the fourth country to launch a satellite into orbit.
• March 31 – Explorer I reentry
• 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 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.

  Computer science

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

  Earth sciences

• January 4 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X. 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.
• Mathematician Kurt Gödel allows circulation of his ontological proof of the existence of God.

  Medicine

• The Dubowitz Score for estimating the gestational age of babies is published by Lilly and Victor Dubowitz.
• 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.

  Physics

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

  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, German physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954.
• May 1 – Ralph Hartley, American electrical engineer.
• July 20 – Margaret Reed Lewis, American cell biologist.
• July 29 – Emanuel Miller, British child psychiatrist.
• August 1 – Otto Heinrich Warburg, German physiologist and winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• September 22 – Vojtěch Jarník, Czech mathematician.