AnveshapresentsSCIENCE QUIZ-2013

NORMAL STUFF

Dendro-climatology is the reconstruction of aspects of past climatic patterns. A.E.Douglas, an astronomer, pioneered it. This is based on examining what?

Answer:Trees (the width of the tree rings can suggest climatic changes in the past)

What would one find at the ends of the ‘Einstein-Rosen Bridge’?

Answer:A ‘black hole’ and a ‘white hole’

How does the zebra- with its black-and-white stripes– camouflage itself in the yellow, brown and green grass to confuse its main predator, the lion?

Answer:Since the lion is colour-blind, the confusion regarding the pattern is enhanced.

In 1798, German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth suggested a name for an element that had been discovered fifteen years earlier by miner Franz Joseph Muller. Since he had already named an element for the sky, he wanted to name one for the earth since in 1798 no element had been named for the earth, and it needed to be done! What did he name it?

Answer:Tellurium, Latin Tellus meaning earth

Which bird is born white but turns pink by eating algae containing beta carotene?

Answer:The flamingo

John Wilson, acting president of the University of Chicago, said this about an Indian professor. ‘He used to drive 100 miles, week after week, to meet with a class of two students. One might have raised a question of relative investment of time and energy, but I don’t think such a thought entered his mind. The 1957 Nobel Prize went to the two students.

Name the professor.

Answer:Professor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a Nobel Prize winner himself ( the students were Tsung-Dao lee and Chen-Ning Yang)

AUDIENCE

What does the male penguin present the female penguin as part of the courtship ritual?

ANSWER

A pebble, to start nest building!

GOOGLE DOODLE

Answer:10.07.09 – 153rd birthday of Nikola Tesla, best known for his Tesla coil invention

Answer:08.11.11 – 355th birthday of Edmond Halley, English scientist who computed the orbit of the eponymous Halley's Comet

Answer:Feb. 19, 1473Nicolas Copernicus’ 540th birthday

Answer:Neils Bohr’s birthday

Answer:Pierre de fermat’s 410th birthday

Answer:Thomas Alva Edison

MIXED BAG

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On the sixth of April, 1846, an group of eminent scientists had just begun their regular meeting. It featured the reading of a scientific paper on the production of ovals and refraction.

The unique feature about this meeting was the fact that the original author of this noteworthy paper had been barred from appearing and publicly reporting on his work for "it was not thought proper for a boy in a round jacket to mount the rostrum there."

Who was this young genius who was fourteen years old at the time?

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CLUE !

When X entered Cambridge, he was a propounder of some strange theories, such as one on the economy of sleep. He would sleep from 5:00pm. to 9:30pm, study from 10:00pm to 2:00am, excercise by running up and down the stairs from 2:00am to 2:30am, and then sleep until 7:00am. However, he was soon forced to abandon this experiment as he was greeted with a barrage of shoes and other flying objects wherever he went.

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Answer:James Clerk Maxwell. In the paper maxwell generalised the definition of an ellipse by defining the locus of a point where the sum of m times the distance from one fixed point plus n times the distance from a second fixed point is constant. If m = n = 1 then the curve is an ellipse. Maxwell also defined curves where there were more than two foci. This became his first paper On the description of oval curves, and those having a plurality of foci which was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 6 April 1846

The scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what his studies had taught him about God, is said to have replied, "I'm not sure, but he seems to be inordinately fond of ________."

Fill in the blank.

Answer:beetles

Beetles are the group of insects with the largest number of known species. They are classified in the order Coleoptera which contains more described species than in any other order in the animal kingdom, constituting about 25% of all known life-forms.

Notes: - Percentages taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle - The above story may be apocryphal (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane), but is apparently quite famous.

Genentech Inc. is the world’s first biotechnology company, founded in 1976 by a venture capitalist Robert Swanson and a biochemist Herbert Boyer. What was its ticker symbol on the NYSE?

Note:It was acquired by Roche Ltd. in March. So, it now trades under the Roche’s ticker ROC

Answer:DNA

X, born on 10 March 1957, in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala is an Indian theoretical physicist. His principal fields of research are Cosmology and the interface between Gravity and Quantum theory. X has received several national and international awards including the Birla Science Prize (1991), the Millennium Medal, Al-Khwarizmi International Award, Sackler Distinguished Astronomer, Miegunah Fellowship Award and the G.D. Birla Award for Scientific Research. His work has won awards from the Gravity Research Foundation, USA five times, in 1984, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2008. He is an elected Fellow of the three National Academies of Science in India. Some of his research papers have been rated as the ‘most influential paper of the year’. ID X.

Answer:Tanu Padmanabhan

Z is described as a bitter, white crystalline xanthine alkaloid that is a psychoactive stimulant drug, but unlike many other psychoactive substances it is legal and unregulated in nearly all jurisdictions. It is found in many plant species, where it acts as a natural pesticide, paralyzing and killing certain insects feeding upon the plant. Its alternative names are mateine and guaranine. What is Z?

Answer:Caffeine

The third value, if you limit the system to a finite class of objects, is the norm and is therefore computed as 1.0. The first and second values are respectively 0.39 and 0.723 while the penultimate value is 19.18 and the eighth value is 30.06. (a) What is this finite set? (b) On what basic computation are these values based?

Answer:(a)Planets of the Solar system.(b)AUs or Astronomical Units are calculated using the distance between Earth and the Sun as the norm.

PICTURE ROUND

Connect.

Answer:Duodenum gets its name from a latin term meaning “12 fingers”

Answer:Programming languages(Java, Pascal, Ada, Ruby and Python)

What did Willard Libby do?

Answer:Radio carbon dating

Id the experiment. The other picture shows the person who did it, as well as how it looked.

Answer:

Miller-Urey Experiment

Urey speculated that the early atmosphere was probably composed of ammonia, methane and hydrogen; one of his Chicago graduate students, Stanley L. Miller showed that, if such a mixture be exposed to ultraviolet radiation and to water, it can interact to produce amino acids, commonly called the “building blocks of life”. The experiment that simulated hypothetical conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested for the occurrence of chemical evolution. Specifically, the experiment tested Soviet scientist Alexander Oparin's and J. B. S. Haldane's hypothesis that conditions on the primitive Earth favored chemical reactions that synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors.

The man in the picture is Harold Urey

ID this guy.

ID this person

Answer:M.S.Swaminathan

VIDEO ROUND

Will Drinking Alcohol Help You Feel Warmer?

Answer:Turns out, just one alcoholic drink could make you feel warmer, but it actually lowers your core body temperature.How does alcohol employ this rule of opposites? Alcohol may make your skin feel warm, but this apparent heat wave is deceptive. A nip or two actually causes your blood vessels to dilate, moving warm blood closer to the surface of your skin, making you feel warmer temporarily. At the same time, however, those same veins pumping blood closer to the skin's surface cause you to lose core body heat - the heat you need to survive, especially if you're stuck in a snowdrift . This effect could lead to fatal hypothermia.

Can Your Cell Phone Interfere With A Planes Instruments?

When you make a call at 10,000 feet, the signal bounces off multiple available cell towers, rather than one at a time. That means too many phone-happy jetsetters might clog up the networks on the ground, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — not the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) — banned cell use on planes.

Can Combining Diet Coke And Mentos Make Your Stomach Explode?

It's true that if you drop a pack of the chewy mints into a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke, the candy's properties react with the carbon dioxide in the soda to spew forth fizz. Physicist Tonya Coffey determined that this happens because Mentos' rough surface breaks up the attraction between water molecules in the Coke, clearing room for carbon dioxide bubbles to form. The gum arabic further fuels the fizz by making the candy fall through the liquid faster, which causes bubbles to form more rapidly.However, when you open and drink a Diet Coke, it releases much of the pressurized carbon dioxide that forms the carbonation. As the soda warms while traveling to the stomach, the gas continues to vaporize. Any remaining might cause your stomach to expand, but it isn't enough to spark a dangerous gassy rebellion if you chase the soda with a pack of Mentos.

Is it possible to beat a Thermal camera?

They tried, for example, spraying Tory down with chilly carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher, but that didn't hold off the heat long enough — neither did covering him head-to-toe in clay. Wearing a skin-tight neoprene suit also allowed some of his body heat to escape. Even when the team raised the room temperature to 98 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius), Tory still tripped up the alarm. Tory was finally able to crack the thermal system only after he donned an insulated, heat-resistant fire suit.Then, to doubly bust the myth, Tory walked through the room undetected by holding a pane of glass in front of him. Although it allows visible light to pass through, glass mostly blocks infrared. Sure enough, Tory's infrared energy — and the thermal camera myth — was no match for the thick glass shield.

How does a xerox machine work?

Inside a copier there is a special drum. The drum acts a lot like a balloon -- you can charge it with a form of static electricity.Inside the copier there is also a very fine black powder known as toner. The drum, charged with static electricity, can attract the toner particles.There are three things about the drum and the toner that let a copier perform its magic:The drum can be selectively charged, so that only parts of it attract toner. In a copier, you make an "image" -- in static electricity -- on the surface of the drum. Where the original sheet of paper is black, you create static electricity on the drum. Where it is white you do not. What you want is for the white areas of the original sheet of paper to NOT attract toner. The way this selectivity is accomplished in a copier is with light -- this is why it's called a photocopier!Somehow the toner has to get onto the drum and then onto a sheet of paper. The drum selectively attracts toner. Then the sheet of paper gets charged with static electricity and it pulls the toner off the drum.The toner is heat sensitive, so the loose toner particles are attached (fused) to the paper with heat as soon as they come off the drum.

Does The Color Red Really Make Bulls Angry?

The red, blue and white flags got equal, half-hearted attacks when they were motionless. In order to elicit an aggressive charge response from the bull, the flags had to be waved.Turns out, the color red isn't what causes bulls to attack. In fact, bulls don't seem to have any color preference at all. They'll charge whichever object is moving the most, which means this old myth can get tossed right out of the ring.