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 (HST) 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.^[1]

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

• 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.

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 discovery that peptic ulcer disease is caused by H. pylori.
• March 23 – Start of Milwaukee Cryptosporidiosis outbreak.
• August – Formal launch of the Cochrane Collaboration.
• The "Intelligent Prosthesis", the first commercially available microprocessor-controlled prosthetic knee, is released by UK company Charles A. Blatchford & Sons.^[2]

Paleontology

• 14-year-old fossil hunter Wes Linster finds the first Bambiraptor skeleton in Montana.

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 (b. 1899)
• February 11 – Robert W. Holley, American biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1922)
• February 21 – Inge Lehmann, Danish seismologist (b. 1888)
• March 4 – Izaak Kolthoff, Dutch 'father of analytical chemistry' (b. 1894)
• July 2 – Elizabeth M. Ramsey, American research physician (b. 1906)
• August 16 – Kitty Joyner, American electrical engineer (b. 1916)
• August 25 – Mildred Creak, English child psychologist (b. 1898)
• September 24 – Bruno Pontecorvo, Italian-born physicist (b. 1913)

Organisations

• Czech Republic and Slovakia join CERN.

References