1993 in science

The year 1993 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

February 13 – Asteroid 7253 Nara is discovered by Fumiaki Uto.
December 2 – STS-61 is launched. This Space Shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope installs corrective optics, plus upgrades, that not only allow the telescope to focus properly, but also increase magnification/clarity beyond the original design. HST had been pre-designed for such continuous improvement.
The first definite asteroid moon is confirmed when the Galileo probe discovers Dactyl orbiting 243 Ida.

March 22 – The Intel Corporation ships the first Pentium chips
March 31 – A bug in a program written by Richard Depew sends an article to 200 newsgroups simultaneously. The term spamming is coined by Joel Furr to describe the incident.
April – Release of the Sibelius music notation program, developed by British twins Ben and Jonathan Finn.
April 22 – Release of version 1.0 of the Mosaic Web browser, devised by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in the United States.
June 9 – Release of Jurassic Park making pioneering use of computer-generated imagery to produce moving images of prehistoric creatures.
June 15 – Adobe publishes the first version of the PDF format together with version 1.0 of its PDF product line Adobe Acrobat

April – Publication of a seminal paper on the particle filter.
June 21 – Andrew Wiles announces a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem at the Isaac Newton Institute. The proof is slightly flawed, but Wiles announces a revised proof the following year.

14-year-old fossil hunter Wes Linster finds the first Bambiraptor skeleton in Montana.
Giant sauropod dinosaur Argentinosaurus formally described by José Bonaparte and Rodolfo Coria.

February – The New England Journal of Medicine publishes findings demonstrating that patients with peptic ulcers can be successfully treated with antibiotics, lending strong support to the Timeline of [peptic ulcer disease and Helicobacter pylori|discovery] that peptic ulcer disease is caused by H. pylori.
March 23 – Start of Milwaukee Cryptosporidiosis outbreak.
July 15 – A study published by Dean Hamer and others in the United States indicates a link between the chromosome band and genetic marker Xq28 and male sexual orientation.
August
* Formal launch of the Cochrane Collaboration.
* Francisco Mojica first characterizes what becomes known as the CRISPR locus.
The "Intelligent Prosthesis", the first commercially available microprocessor-controlled prosthetic knee, is released by UK company Charles A. Blatchford & Sons.