1993 in science

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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.

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 22 - Release of version 1.0 of the Mosaic web browser.

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.
• 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.

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 Stearns
• Wollaston Medal for Geology - Samuel Epstein

Deaths

• February 11 - Robert W. Holley, American biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1922)
• March 4 - Izaak Kolthoff, Dutch 'father of analytical chemistry' (b. 1894)

Organisations

• Czechia and Slovakia join CERN.