1971 in science

• January 31 – Apollo program: Astronauts aboard Apollo 14 lift off for a mission to the Moon. • February 5 – Apollo 14 lands on the Moon. • February 9 – Apollo program: Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third crewed Moon landing. • May 19 – Mars probe program: Mars 2 is launched by the Soviet Union. • May 30 – Mariner program: Mariner 9 is launched toward Mars. • June 30 – The crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft are killed when their air supply leaks out through a faulty valve during re-entry preparations, the only human deaths to occur outside Earth's atmosphere. • July 26 – Apollo program: Launch of Apollo 15. On July 31 the Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover a day after landing on the Moon's surface. • November 13 – Mariner program: Mariner 9 enters Mars orbit. ==Biology==

• July – Francis G. Howarth discovers communities of specialized thermophile cave animals living in lava tubes at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. • C. A. W. Jeekel publishes Nomenclator Generum et Familiarum Diplopodorum. • John O'Keefe discovers place cells in the mammalian brain. ==Computer science==

• July 4 – Michael S. Hart posts the first e-book, a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, on the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's mainframe computer, the origin of Project Gutenberg. • November 3 – The ''Unix Programmer's Manual'' is published. • November 15 – Intel release the world's first microprocessor, the 4004. • November/December – Computer Space is released, the first arcade video game. • Ray Tomlinson sends the first ARPAnet e-mail between host computers, at BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the first use of the @ sign in an address. • Kenbak-1 goes on sale, considered to be the world's first personal computer by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum. • The earliest floppy disks, 8 inches in diameter, become commercially available as components of products shipped by IBM, their inventor. ==Conservation==

• February 2 – The international Ramsar Convention for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands is signed in Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran. ==Earth sciences==

• February 9 – The San Fernando (Sylmar) earthquake occurs in southern California with a magnitude of 6.6 and a perceived intensity of XI (extreme) on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale. ==Mathematics==

• Stephen Cook introduces the concept of NP-completeness in computational complexity theory at the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. • Daniel Quillen publishes a proof of the Adams conjecture. • Steven Takiff introduces Takiff algebras. • The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is first presented explicitly, by Hilary Putnam in his book Philosophy of Logic. ==Medicine==

• October 1 – Godfrey Hounsfield's invention, X-ray computed tomography, is first used on a patient with a cerebral cyst at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London. • Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves in the U.S. • E. G. L. Bywaters characterises adult-onset Still's disease, a rare form of inflammatory arthritis. • Smallpox is eradicated from the Americas. ==Paleontology==

• August 3 – The Fighting Dinosaurs, a fossil specimen featuring a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops in combat, is first located in the Late Cretaceous Djadochta Formation of Mongolia by a Polish-Mongolian team. ==Physics==

• Roger Penrose proposes the Penrose process. ==Psychology==

• August 14–20 – Stanford prison experiment. • Konrad Lorenz publishes Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume II. ==Technology==

• Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs in the United States set out the parameters for a practical cellular telephone network. • J. J. Stiffler publishes his book Theory of Synchronous Communications and edits a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology on error correction codes. ==Institutions==

• Paris Descartes University begins to function in continuation of the medical department of the University of Paris. ==Awards==

• Nobel Prizes • Physics – Dennis Gabor • Chemistry – Gerhard Herzberg • Medicine – Earl W Sutherland, Jr • Turing Award – John McCarthy ==Births==

• May 29 – Howard Gobioff (d. 2008), American computer scientist. • June 28 – Elon Musk, South African-born Canadian-American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor. • July 4 – Sivakumar Veerasamy, Indian plant geneticist. • July 21 – Sara Seager, Canadian-American astrophysicist. • August 2 – Ruth Lawrence, English-born mathematician. ==Deaths==

• January 23 – Fritz Feigl (b. 1891), Austrian-born Brazilian chemist • January 25 – Donald Winnicott (b. 1896), English child psychiatrist. • February 16 – Heinrich Willi (b. 1900), Swiss pediatrician. • February 25 – Theodor Svedberg (b. 1884), Swedish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate • March 11 – Philo T. Farnsworth (b. 1906), American television pioneer. • April 1 – Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (b. 1903), Irish-born crystallographer. • April 6 – Margaret Newton (b. 1887), Canadian plant pathologist. • April 12 – Igor Tamm (b. 1895), Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate • June 6 – Edward Andrade (b. 1887), English physicist. • June 15 • Hillel Oppenheimer (b. 1899), German-born Israeli botanist. • Wendell Meredith Stanley (b. 1904), American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate. • June 30 – Soviet cosmonauts • Georgy Dobrovolsky (b. 1928) • Vladislav Volkov (b. 1935) • Viktor Patsayev (b. 1933) • September 15 – Benno Mengele (b. 1898), Austrian electrical engineer ==References==