1918 in science

The following events in science and technology occurred in the year 1918.

Astronomy

June 8 – Nova Aquila, the brightest observed since 1604, is discovered.
Kiyotsugu Hirayama identifies several groups of main belt asteroids, now known as Hirayama families.
Harlow Shapley demonstrates that globular clusters are arranged in a spheroid or halo whose center is not the Earth, but the center of the galaxy.
Heber Curtis discovers a relativistic jet of matter emerging from Elliptical galaxy M87.

February 21 – The last known Carolina parakeet dies in Cincinnati Zoo.
Around 1000 pilot whales strand in the Chatham Islands.
R. A. Fisher puts forward a genetic model that shows that continuous variation could be the result of Mendelian inheritance in his paper "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance".
J. Henri Fabre's The Sacred Beetle, and others published in English.
Jacques Loeb's Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal Conduct published in the United States.

January – 1918 flu pandemic: "Spanish 'flu" first observed in Haskell County, Kansas.
March 26 – Dr. Marie Stopes publishes her influential book Married Love in the U.K., following it with Wise Parenthood, a treatise on birth control.
June–August – "Spanish 'flu" becomes pandemic.
September 7 – J. B. Christopherson publishes his discovery that antimony potassium tartrate is an effective cure for bilharzia.
Hartog Jacob Hamburger describes the chloride shift.

April 10 – Alexander M. Nicolson files a United States patent for the radio crystal oscillator.
July – American cinematographer Frank D. Williams is granted a patent for the "Williams process" of travelling matte.
Edwin Howard Armstrong develops the superheterodyne receiver.
George Constantinescu publishes Theory of sonics: a treatise on transmission of power by vibrations, originating the study of this branch of continuum mechanics.
Theodore von Karman and Asbóth Oszkár build the first co-axial helicopter.
Charles Strite invents the pop-up toaster.

January 23 – Gertrude B. Elion, American pharmacologist, Nobel laureate.
January 27 – Antonín Mrkos, Czech astronomer.
March 13 – Marjorie Blamey, English botanical illustrator.
March 16 – Frederick Reines, American physicist, Nobel laureate.
April 4 – Joseph Ashbrook, American astronomer.
April 25 – Gérard de Vaucouleurs, French astronomer.
May 11 – Richard Feynman, American physicist, Nobel laureate.
May 20 – Alexandra Illmer Forsythe, American computer scientist
June 6 – Edwin G. Krebs, American biochemist, Nobel laureate.
July 15
* Bertram Brockhouse, Canadian physicist.
* Brenda Milner, English-born neuropsychologist.
July 16 – Samuel Victor Perry, English biochemist, pioneer in the field of muscle biochemistry.
August 3 – Cheng Kaijia, Chinese nuclear physicist.
August 13 – Frederick Sanger, English molecular biologist, double Nobel laureate.
August 26 – Katherine Johnson, African American mathematician and space physicist.
August 29 – John Herivel, British cryptanalyst and science historian.
September 8 – Derek Barton, English-born organic chemist, Nobel laureate.
September 27 – Martin Ryle, English radio astronomer.
October 4 – Adrian Kantrowitz, American cardiac surgeon.
November 10 – Ernst Otto Fischer, German chemist, Nobel laureate.
November 19 – Hendrik C. van de Hulst, Dutch astronomer.
December 25 – Tamara Mikhaylovna Smirnova, Russian astronomer.
Eleanor C. Pressly, American mathematician and aeronautical engineer.