2. 1.
"But what about the End of the Universe? We'll
miss the big moment."
"I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod, "nothing but
a ____ __."
"A what?"
"Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy."
This is an exchange between Zaphod and Ford
Prefect in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Identify
the phrase that fills up the blanks.
5. 2. In the 1950s Polio epidemic,
severely affected individuals
could be kept alive by Iron
Lungs. But there were very few
of these.
The first Respiratory Centre
opened at the Bledgam
Hospital in Copenhagen in
1952, the idea of Bjorn Ibsen,
anaesthesiologist.
Elaborating on this, what other
first did he go on to establish ?
8. 3. It is silvery and stronger than steel but much lighter in weight. The
malleability, lack of tarnishing and use of the metal in jewelry suggest some similarity
to platinum, while its strength and lightness suggest titanium. Aluminum has also
been suggested as a possible identity.
Connect the above description to the picture below, with one word.
10. MIThril
• MIT’s MIThril - the next generation research
platform for context aware wearable
computing
• The name is a wordplay on Mithril – from
Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings
11. 4.
• Microsoft Layer for Unicode (or MSLU) is a
software library for Windows software
developers to simplify creating Unicode-aware
applications for Windows 95, Windows 98, or
Windows Me. However, the delay of its launch
gave the product a pejorative codename.
What was its code name?
13. GODOT
Named after the play Waiting for Godot
(centered around the failure of a man named
"Godot" to appear and the endless wait for
him), because it was felt to be long overdue.
14. 5.
• Tabasheer or banslochan is a translucent
white substance, composed mainly
of silica and water with traces of lime
and potash, obtained from the nodal joints of
some species of a plant. It is considered a
cure for coughs and asthma, and is also
thought to be an aphrodisiac. Which plant
secretes this substance?
17. 6. Fill in the blank
• A gömböc is a convex three-dimensional
homogeneous body which, when resting on a flat
surface, has just one stable and one unstable
point of equilibrium. Its existence was
conjectured by Russian mathematician Vladimir
Arnold in 1995 and proven in 2006 by Hungarian
scientists Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi. Its
shape helped to explain the body structure of
some ____________in relation to their ability to
return to equilibrium position after being placed
upside down.
24. 8.
• Hyalinobatrachium Pellucidum is a species of
great aesthetic value. After its discovery in the
50s, its status was mostly unknown, until it was
found again in South America in 2009. According
to School teachers in Japan, explaining the
anatomy is a lot easier when you have even one
such animal in your biology lab. What’s the
common name of the Hyalinobatrachium
Pellucidum?
27. 9.
• This Physicist, was reportedly nominated for
the Nobel Prize many times without ever
winning. So the press refers to this scientist as
the Dynasty of the Nobel Prize scene – that
show was nominated for 24 Emmy Awards but
never won. Who?
30. 10.
• Dawn a science fiction novel by Dean McLaughlin is a
re-imagining of Issaac Asimov’s classic 1941 short story,
"Nightfall". Dawn is set on a world with six or seven
"gods" — "Blazing A", "Red B", "Actinic C", "Bright D",
"Gold Ephron", and "Embrous Zwicky". Turns out, the
nomenclature began as a tribute to the authors of a
1948 scientific paper who argued that the Big Bang
would create hydrogen, helium and heavier elements
in the correct proportions to explain their abundance
in the early universe. D was a very famous British
Chemist of 18th Century.
32. • The Scientific paper in question was "The
Origin of Chemical Elements", also known as
the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper. So the
planets were named Alpher, Bethe, Gamow
and Dalton
33. 11.
• The X point is a sequence of six 9s that begins
at the 762nd decimal place of the decimal
representation of π. It is named after X , who
once stated during a lecture that he would like
to memorize the digits of π until that point, so
he could recite them and quip "nine nine nine
nine nine nine and so on", suggesting, in
a tongue-in-cheek manner, that π is rational.
40. 13.
• A ________ is a unit of area. Originally used in nuclear
physics for expressing the cross sectional area of nuclei and
nuclear reactions, today it is used in all fields of high energy
physics to express the cross sections of any scattering
process, and is best understood as a measure of the
probability of interaction between small particles. A _____
is defined as 10−28 m2 (100 fm2) and is approximately the
cross sectional area of a uranium nucleus. The ______ is
also the unit of area used in nuclear quadrupole resonance
and nuclear magnetic resonance to quantify the interaction
of a nucleus with an electric field gradient.
• Two related units are the outhouse and the shed although
these are rarely used in practice.
43. 14. What is being described here ?
• Dhenu stanya masoorika
naraanaamca masoorika
tajjalam baahu moolaaca
satraatena gruheetavaan
baahunoola ca sastraani
raktolpatti karaani ca
tajjalam rekta militam
spotaka jvara sambhavam
(Saakteya Grandhah by Dhanwantari)
45. Vaccination
• “Take the fluid of the pock on the udder of the
cow or on the arm between the shoulder and
elbow of a human subject on the point of a
lancet, and lance with it, the arm between the
shoulders and elbows until blood appears:
then mixing the fluid with blood the fever of
the smallpox will be produced”
46. 15. According to this recently published article in
NEJM there is a positive linear correlation between
a certain dietary aspect and winning nobel prizes.
What?
52. • Dr. Paul Ehrlich with Sahachiro Hata
• Salvarsan
• Movie is Dr Erlich’s Magic Bullet.
53. 17.
• In the year 2001 William Knowles, Ryoji Nyori
and Barry Sharpless won the Nobel in
Chemistry for their work on asymmetric
synthesis. This process was mainly useful in
the production of ______, the only known
clinical treatment for Parkinson’s disease.
56. 18.
• The following curve is named after a famous
18th century scientist. The construction of this
curve involves a mechanism that vaguely
resembles his invention. Name the
curve/scientist.
60. 19.
• In meteorology, an oktas is a unit of
measurement used to describe the amount of
_____ _______ at any given location such as a
weather station. Its value range from 0 to 8 (0
being minimum and 8 being maximum).
• A place like Hyderabad has an oktas value of
almost 0 throughout the year apart from the
monsoon season when the value is around 8.
• A place like Cherapunjee will probably have an
oktas value of 8 throughout the year.
