1974 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 8 – After 84 days in space, the last crew of the temporary American space station Skylab return to Earth.
• February 13–15 – Sagittarius A*, thought to be the location of a supermassive black hole, is identified by Bruce Balick and Robert Brown using the baseline interferometer of the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
• November 16 – Arecibo message transmitted from Arecibo Observatory to Messier 13.
• Hawking radiation is predicted by Stephen Hawking.

  Computer Science

• The Mark-8 microcomputer based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor is designed by Jonathan Titus. It is announced on the cover of the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics as "Your Personal Minicomputer".

  History of science

• F. W. Winterbotham publishes The Ultra secret: the inside story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park and Enigma, the first popular account of cryptography carried out at Bletchley Park during World War II.

  Mathematics

• Yves Hellegouarch proposes a connection between Fermat's Last Theorem and the Frey curve.

  Medicine

• September 25 - 1974 – The first "Tommy John surgery" for replacement of ulnar collateral ligament of elbow joint is performed by Frank Jobe in the United States.
• Identification of controlled trials in perinatal medicine, as advocated by Archie Cochrane, begins in Cardiff, Wales.
• Henry Heimlich describes the "Heimlich Maneuver" as a treatment for choking.

  Paleoanthropology and paleontology

• November 24 – A group of paleoanthropologists discover remains of a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, nicknaming her "Lucy".

  Physics

• May 18 – "Smiling Buddha", India's first nuclear test explosion takes place underground at Pokhran.
• "November Revolution": J/ψ meson, the first particle found to contain a charm quark, discovered by teams at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, led by Samuel Ting, and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, led by Burton Richter.

  Physiology

• May – British neuroscientists John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz announce their isolation of the peptides met- and leu-enkephalin.

  Psychology

• Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins is published by Konrad Lorenz.
• Leon Kamin demonstrates that Sir Cyril Burt's influential research into heritability of IQ using twin studies shows evidence of statistical falsification.

  Technology

• June 26 – The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time, to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, the first use of barcode technology in American retailing.
• Stephen Salter invents the "Salter Duck", a wave energy converter.

  Zoology

• January 7 – Outbreak of 4-year Gombe Chimpanzee War in Tanzania, reported by Jane Goodall.
• Digital dermatitis in cattle identified in Italy by Cheli and Mortellaro.

  Other events

• Rubik's Cube invented by Ernő Rubik.

  Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Enrico Bombieri and David Mumford
• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Martin Ryle, Antony Hewish
• * Chemistry – Paul J. Flory
• * Medicine – Albert Claude, Christian de Duve, George Emil Palade
• Turing Award – Donald Knuth

  Births

• March 10 – Biz Stone, American computing entrepreneur
• August 8 – Manjul Bhargava, Canadian-born mathematician
• August 11 – Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, English cognitive neuroscientist
• September 28 – Sunil Kumar Verma, Indian biologist

  Deaths

• February 4 – S. N. Bose, Indian physicist
• April 12 – Cornelis Simon Meijer, Dutch mathematician
• May 4 – Ludwig Koch, German-born British animal sound recordist
• May 18 – Harry Ricardo, English mechanical engineer
• May 22 – Irmgard Flügge-Lotz, German-American mathematician and aerospace engineer
• June 28 – Vannevar Bush, American science administrator
• July 3 – Sergey Lebedev, Soviet Russian computer scientist
• August 22 – Jacob Bronowski, Polish-born British scientific polymath