1976 in science

The year 1976 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

March – Faber–Jackson relation presented by astronomers Sandra M. Faber and Robert Earl Jackson.
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.
Universe, a public domain film produced by Lester Novros for NASA, is released.

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.

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 in California and on April 11 they launch their first computer, the Apple I, for the U.S. hobbyist market.
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 (originated by Michael Shrayer), the first word processor for home computers.

November – 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.

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.

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.

July 27 – Delegates attending an American Legion convention at The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, US, begin falling ill with a form of pneumonia: this will eventually be recognised as the first outbreak of Legionnaires' disease and will end in the deaths of 29 attendees.
August 26 – The Ebola virus first emerges in outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, followed by outbreaks in Sudan.
October 1–December 16 – Program of mass vaccination in the United States against the 1976 swine flu outbreak, suspended due to public fears over side-effects.
October 28 – British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is published, introducing the term memetics.
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.

January 19 – Hidetsugu Yagi (b. 1886), Japanese electrical engineer.
February 1
Werner Heisenberg (b. 1901), German theoretical physicist.
George Whipple (b. 1878), American pathologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934.
April 5 – Wilder Penfield (b. 1891), American-Canadian neurosurgeon.
April 21 – Carl Benjamin Boyer (b. 1906), American historian of mathematics.
May 31 – Jacques Monod (b. 1910), French biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.
August 18 – Shintaro Uda (b. 1886), Japanese electrical engineer.
October 5 – Lars Onsager (b. 1903), Norwegian American chemist.
September 16 – Bertha Lutz (b. 1894), Brazilian herpetologist and women's rights campaigner.
September 26 – Pál Turán (b. 1910), Hungarian mathematician.
November 5 – Willi Hennig (b. 1913), German entomologist and pioneer of cladistics.