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.
Computer science
- 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
Mathematics
- 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.
Paleontology
- 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.
Physics
- Leon M. Lederman and Dick Teresi publish The God Particle.
Physiology and medicine
- 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.
Awards
- Nobel Prizes
- * Physics – Russell A. Hulse, Joseph H. Taylor Jr.
- * Chemistry – Kary Mullis, Michael Smith
- * Medicine – Richard J. Roberts, Phillip A. Sharp
- Turing Award – Juris Hartmanis, Richard E. Stearns
- Wollaston Medal for Geology – Samuel Epstein
Deaths
- January 9 – Dame Janet Vaughan, English physiologist
- January 28 – Helen Sawyer Hogg, Canadian astronomer
- February 11 – Robert W. Holley, American biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- February 21 – Inge Lehmann, Danish seismologist
- March 4 – Izaak Kolthoff, Dutch 'father of analytical chemistry'
- April 1 – Solly Zuckerman, British government scientific advisor
- July 2
- * Elizabeth M. Ramsey, American research physician
- *Clarence Zener, American physicist
- July 24 – Anna Maurizio, Swiss biologist
- August 16 – Kitty Joyner, American electrical engineer
- August 25 – Mildred Creak, English child psychologist
- September 24 – Bruno Pontecorvo, Italian-born Soviet nuclear physicist
- October 1 – Vera Peters, Canadian oncologist
- October 17 – Zvi Sliternik, Israeli entomologist
- November 1 – Severo Ochoa, Spanish biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Organisations
- Czech Republic and Slovakia join CERN.