1976 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• June 18 – Gravity Probe A, a satellite-based experiment to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, is launched.
• July 20 – Viking program: The Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
• July 31 – NASA releases the famous 'Face on Mars' photograph, taken by Viking 1
• August 7 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters into orbit around Mars.
• August 22 – Luna program: Luna 24 successfully makes an unmanned landing on the Moon, the last for 37 years.
• September 3 – Viking program: The Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars and takes the first close-up color photographs of the planet's surface.
• September 17 – Space Shuttle Enterprise rolled out.

  Aviation

• January 21 – Concorde begins commercial flights.
• December 8 – First flight of production General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon.

  Biology

• Richard Dawkins publishes The Selfish Gene.
• Ebola virus outbreak in Africa

  Chemistry

• May – Marion M. Bradford publishes the Bradford protein assay method.
• Oberlin, Endo and Koyama publish evidence of the creation of carbon nanotubes using a vapor-growth technique.

  Computer science

• January – The Cray-1, the first commercially developed supercomputer, is released by Seymour Cray's Cray Research. Model 001 is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.
• March – Peter Chen's key paper on the entity–relationship model is published, having first been presented at a conference in September 1975.
• April 1 – Apple Computer Company is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and the latter begins assembling its first personal computer hobbyists kits for sale later in the year in the U.S.
• November 26 – Little-known company Microsoft is officially registered with the Office of the Secretary of State of New Mexico.
• December – Release of Electric Pencil, the first word processor for home computers.

  Cryptography

• An asymmetric-key cryptosystem is published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman who disclose the Diffie–Hellman key exchange method of public-key agreement for public-key cryptography.

  History of science and technology

• October 3 – Opening of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, D.C.
• Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine is published.

  Mathematics

• July 11 – Keuffel and Esser manufacture the last slide rule in the United States.
• Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations: the Logic of Mathematical Discovery is published posthumously.
• The four color theorem is proved by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the first major theorem to be proved using a computer.
• Andrei Suslin and Daniel Quillen independently prove the Quillen–Suslin theorem about the triviality of algebraic vector bundles on affine space.

  Paleontology

• Fossil footprints of bipedal hominini from 3.6M years BP are found at Laetoli in Tanzania by Andrew Hill when visiting Mary Leakey.

  Physiology, medicine and psychology

• The Ebola virus first emerges in outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Zaire and Sudan.
• Dementia with Lewy bodies is first described by Japanese psychiatrist and neuropathologist Kenji Kosaka.
• The term Münchausen syndrome by proxy is first coined by John Money and June Faith Werlwas.
• Norman F. Dixon publishes On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.

  Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Burton Richter, Samuel C. C. Ting
• * Chemistry – William N. Lipscomb
• * Medicine – Baruch S. Blumberg, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
• Turing Award – Michael O. Rabin, Dana Scott

  Births

• July 27 – Demis Hassabis, British artificial intelligence researcher
• November 19 – Jack Dorsey, American web developer

  Deaths

• January 19 – Hidetsugu Yagi, Japanese electrical engineer
• February 1
• * Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist.
• * George Whipple, American pathologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934.
• April 21 – Carl Benjamin Boyer, American historian of mathematics.
• May 31 – Jacques Monod, French biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.
• August 18 – Shintaro Uda, Japanese electrical engineer.
• October 5 – Lars Onsager, Norwegian American chemist.
• September 16 – Bertha Lutz, Brazilian herpetologist and women's rights campaigner.
• September 26 – Pál Turán, Hungarian mathematician.
• November 5 – Willi Hennig, German entomologist and pioneer of cladistics.