2018 KQA Science Quiz -- Finals

How does a mythological creature connect these,
often found on seashores?
plastic

Mermaid’s pouch – Egg cases of
cartilaginous fish
(sharks, rays, skates)
Mermaid’s tears
(Glass pieces smoothened by sea erosion were
called that; term now applied to microplastics
that pollute the oceans too)

The Cassini mission’s flyby last year of this giant,
first discovered by William Herschel, has made it the
#1 target of future missions in search for extra-
terrestrial life. High temperatures and water cause
low-silica mafic (Mg + Fe) rocks to oxidize, releasing
H2 and energy in a process called serpentization.
Some believe that this process is what energised
the first metabolic process of ‘life’ on Earth.
Identify this celestial body. Where on Earth
would you see serpentisation?

Enceladus
Deep sea hydrothermal vents

Ken Catania argues that these experiments
support a widely disbelieved observation from
some 200-years ago. What story?

Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘fishing
with horses’ story

Story from Greek mythology –
Tereus rapes his sister-in-law Philomela & cuts off
her tongue as she doesn’t remain silent.
Philomela weaves a tapestry about the incident &
sends it to her sister Procne. Procne kills and
serves Itylos, her son by Tereus, as a meal. The
sisters present Tereus with Itylos’ head after the
meal. In a rage, Tereus grabs an axe and rushes
to kill the sisters, when the Gods finally intervene
by changing them all into birds.

While Procne is turned into a swallow, Philomela is
turned into a bird in which only the male birds sing.
Which bird, whose song has long been
interpreted as a lament?
Tereus is turned into a bird whose common English
name AND scientific name are onomatopoeic forms
that imitate its cry.
Which bird?

Nightingale
Hoopoe (Upupa epops)

Elie Metchinkoff was one of immunology’s
founders, most known for his work on the cell &
process shown in this video. Identify either.
Remarkably prescient, he also introduced the idea
of __________, advocating their use as a panacea.
This went against conventional thought of those
times, which viewed microbes almost exclusively
as pathogens.
What concept?

Macrophage or Phagocytosis
Probiotic

The 2016 Chemistry Nobel was awarded to Bernard
Ferringa, Jean-Pierre Sauvage & Fraser Stoddart
for synthesizing such complex molecules.
What term was coined to describe the
connections of such interlocked assemblies?
The simplest class of such molecules get their
name from the Latin for ‘chain’ – a word that is also
used to describe the linking of genetic subunits, an
operation linking two vectors in mathematics, a
computer networking optimization, as well as a
fundamental feature of carbon atoms.
What’s the good word?

Rotaxane
Molecular trefoil knots
Molecular Borromean rings

Mechanical Bonds
(mechanically interlocked molecular architectures)
Catenation
(catena – chain)

Dr. Abraham Periera runs into the “dreamers” – a lost
tribe with eternal life but very stupid people. After a
ceremony where they ritually eat sacred turtles, he
figures the meat is the cause of longevity & brain
damage. The ceremony also involves ritualised rape of a
boy; he later has sex with the boy. Periera steals turtle
meat for research, finds the life-extending substance
and eventually wins a Nobel prize. He adopts many
children from this island, but the turtles & island are
destroyed due to exploitation by the pharma industry. In
a post-script it is revealed that Periera sexually abused
most of his ‘adoptees’.
Acclaimed 2013 debut novel inspired by Daniel
Gajdusek, who won the Nobel prize for Medicine in
1976. What did he work on?

Kuru
(part points for prion disease)

Folk music-dance tradition called pizzica from the
Salentino region, one of the many taranta dances.
Tradition says that it is a result of a particular
human-animal encounter.
What encounter, or how does it get its name?

Some trace the taranta’s origins to Dionysian cult
rituals, while others say it comes from tarantism –
the Italian variant of the dancing mania that
gripped Europe during the 14th – 17th centuries.
While religion/cult-induced mass hysteria was
probably involved, the symptoms match those of
long-term _____ poisoning, a disorder induced by
eating Claviceps purpurea-infected grain.
What medical disorder?

Bite of a wolf spider
Dancing the taranta to the rapid tambourine beat
supposedly drew the poison out of your body
Ergot poisoning

This hell-raiser turned to the natural sciences with
such fervour that ‘professionals’ dissed his ideas -
Emil du Bois-Raymond called his attempt to
disprove Newton the “stillborn bagatelle of a
dilettantish autodidact.”
In 1784 he discovered the inter-maxillary bone in
the skull linking us with other species, but was
once again pooh-poohed for “lacking a
methodological framework”. The bone is now
named after him.
Who? And what was his attempt at disproving
Newton?

Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Theory of Colour
(Physicists ignored the colour-seeing faculty of the eye;
Goethe built his ideas on the human eye’s experience)

The Poeceae are the fifth-largest plant family, with
over 750 genera and 10,500 species, and cover
~40% of the Earth’s surface. Although they
originated in the late Cretaceous, rapid expansion
happened only when CO2 levels were decreasing
~30 million years ago. A switch from C3 to C4
metabolism is seen as a major reason for this
expansion. How do we better know this family?
Given that plants with C4 metabolism are seen as
one of the solutions to climate change, what
exactly is this C3  C4 switch?

Grasses
More efficient carbon fixation during
photosynthesis
C4 photosynthesis ends with 4-carbon molecule (malate
or aspartate) being made, instead of a 3-carbon molecule
(phosphoglyceric acid).
Grasses fix ~23% of carbon despite representing just 5%
of total plant biomass on Earth

The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox was a criticism of
early quantum mechanics. It essentially says that
particles can interact in such a way that it is possible to
measure both position & momentum of particles more
accurately than Heisenberg’s rules allowed, unless
measuring one particle instantaneously affected the
other – information travels faster than light, which
violates the theory of relativity. We now know this
phenomenon as quantum entanglement.
What memorable phrase did Einstein coin to
describe this process?
How do we better know this early quantum
mechanics championed by Neils Bohr &
Heisenberg?

Spooky action at a distance
The Copenhagen Interpretation

Historians ascribe the glowing lights & garbled
electronic sightings to weather, schools of fish or
whales near the surface, or just faulty equipment.
Some marine biologists however, favour the
hypothesis that these free-floating colonial
tunicates called pyrosomes were responsible.
What infamous 20th century incident?

Gulf of Tonkin ‘attack’
In the 2003 documentary Fog of War, Robert McNamara
admits there was no August 4th attack.
Commander James Stockdale said later “…our
destroyers were shooting at phantom targets… there
was nothing but black water and American firepower.”

The 17th century Jesuit priest & astronomer
Christoph Schneier invented the pantograph while
still a student; it has essentially remained
unchanged since. What would one use this for?

Schneier and Galileo began their studies around the
same time, but disagreed on what they were seeing.
Adhering to the Aristotelian perfection of the
heavens, Schneier thought these were small orbiting
satellites; using observation & mathematical
analysis Galileo showed that they were actually
features on the surface.
The dispute rumbled on for ~20 years, with Galileo
claiming credit for being the first to see them, falsely
accusing Schneier of plagiarism & shoddy
observations etc.
What was this dispute about?

Duplicating images to scale
Sunspots

Exhaustive list of non-human animals that undergo
the process X. The related process Y has been
seen so far only in humans, orangutans & short-
finned pilot whales in the wild.
Identify both processes.

X – Menstruation
Y – Menopause
(has been seen in a few other animals in captivity)

Early 1920s, England.
3 statisticians break for tea. X pours a cup for Muriel
Bristol, who refuses it saying she preferred the taste of
a cup in which milk had been poured first. X can’t
believe what he’s hearing, and so the 3rd statistician
William Roach suggests they devise an experiment and
test this claim. But how to test this accurately?
X eventually designed an exact test, which he
expounded upon in his 1935 work The Design of
Experiments. The method soon became the standard
for almost all of science.
Identify X, and the method of experimentation he
introduced.

Ronald Fisher
Null hypothesis testing

In 2014 the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)
banned the use of the noble gases Xenon and
Argon by athletes, even though there wasn’t really
any test to detect them.
Why did they take this extreme measure?

Blood doping
Breathing Xenon or Argon enriched air creates a hypoxic
(low O2) condition, which stimulates your body to make
erythropoietin (EPO) that increases RBC production.
It is similar to training at high altitudes prior to sports
events.

Rules
• 5 question linked by a fairly simple theme
• Identify the scientist (+5) and their
discovery/contribution (+5). Clues for both in
the visuals
• Theme on the pounce; points indicated on
each slide

Rita Levi-Montalcini
Nerve Growth Factor

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
X-ray crystallography
(protein/biomolecule structure)

May Britt-Moser
Grid cells/Place cells
(the brain’s GPS or how the brain makes sense
of direction will also be fine)

Maria Goeppert-Mayer
The Onion Madonna

When Nobel prize winner X decided to run for
post of Israel's president in 2014, he had to first
get the endorsement of 10 members of the
Knesset before he could do so. He got only one.
Israeli media then started calling him the quasi-
President, bringing to mind an insult X got in
the early 1980s from Y, a scientist with a rare
double. Y considered X’s radical theory
impossible, but was proven wrong a few years
later.
Who is X? Who insulted him and how?

Daniel Schechtman
Linus Pauling
“there are no quasi-crystals, there are only
quasi-scientists”

Feynman describing a ‘perpetual motion’ machine
that initially appears to be a demonstration of a
famous 19th-century thought experiment. What?

3.
Some of the 7 base units in the SI from which all
other units can be measured will be redefined at
2018 General Conference on Weights and
Measures. Each base unit will now be defined
through some constant or property of nature.
However one of the seven will depend on human
beings, in fact the average human being, for its
definition.
Which one and how?

This species is named after an equipment that
allows work and exploration underwater.
Explorers can come to it for a replenishment of
oxygen and go back into the water. Variants with
open and closed bottom of the equipment exist.
What species?

The book is about the debate between a 17th
century scientist and a philosopher not known
for being optimistic about society. The title is a
reference to both the philosopher’s most famous
work, and an apparatus the scientist did
experiments with (that was built for him by
Robert Hooke). The scientist argued that natural
philosophical knowledge can only be generated
by experiments, thus becoming a pioneer of the
scientific method.
What is the title? Name either the scientist OR
the philosopher.

It might seem that the work that won the 1906
Nobel prize in Physics and the works that won
the same prize in 1929 & 1937 contradict each.
The fact that they don’t was one of the
consequences of the scientific revolution of the
20th century. What is interesting is that one of
the 1937 Nobel prize winners was the son of the
1906 winner.
What is common surname?
What did they win the Nobel prizes for?

JJ Thomson and George Paget
Thomson
JJ discovered the particle electron
George Paget Thomson for showing
electron diffraction – wave like
behaviour of electrons

During WW 2, the psychologist X was employed
by the US military to developed guidance
systems for missiles, as electronic guidance
systems were not yet reliable. X’s solution was to
divide the nose cone into 3 chambers with a
primitive touchscreen as part of steering
mechanism in each. He used techniques he is
most famous for to develop feedback to steer the
missiles. However the steering mechanism
wasn’t able to keep up with the rapid feedback
from the 3 chambers.
Who is X? How did the guidance system work?

B F Skinner
Pigeons were used – they pecked
on the screen in front of them to
steer the missiles left or right

X, Y and Z are three classes of probabilistic
algorithms in computer science, now used in
various other fields. X is the most well known
and was developed during WW 2 for computing
neutron diffusion. It was named so because one
of its developers had a liking to poker. It can fail/
give wrong result some times.
In contrast, Z is always correct, but its run time
is indeterminate Y on the other hand are
probably correct and probably fast, falling in
between X and Z in performance, and
geographically too.
What are X, Y and Z?

X = Monte Carlo
Y = Atlantic City
Z = Las Vegas

The figure in this monument found in Boston
Public Gardens is known as The Good
Samaritan. It shows a Moorish doctor helping
someone – this deliberate anachronism was to
avoid choosing sides over claims of credit. The
monument was erected in 1868.
What is the monument called OR what was it
dedicated to?

Discovery of Ether as an Anaesthetic.

Isotopes of an element typically all have the same
name with an alphabet or number differentiating
the different isotopes – U235/U238, C12/C14,
Radium A/Radium B/../Radium F.
Two elements, X and Y, however have isotopes
that different names.
X has 3 isotopes, all with different names.
Y is a radioactive noble gas – it has one isotope
with a different name that comes because
Thorium’s decay produces it.
Identify the elements X and Y.

X = Hydrogen
(Deuterium and Tritium)
Y = Radon
(Thoron and Actinon)

The word was first used in the book Alchemia by
Andreas Libavius in 1597 to refer to the
decomposition of base metals into Gold and
Silver. Berzelius used it first in its current sense
of meaning in 1835 while examining the effect of
sulphuric acid on the conversion of ethanol to
ether. He explained this effect of sulphuric acid
due to an unseen impact of chemical affinity and
gave a name from Greek meaning to annul/to
untie/to pickup.
What word?

This is a popular ornamental flowering plant
found in backyards, but its bloom is technically
not a flower but mostly sepals or modified leaves.
The variety of colours make this ‘flower’ stand
out.
The colours however, are not a result of pigments
but due to the pH in the soil, and changes with
the availability of Al3+ ions. The more basic the
soil, the less Al3+ ions are available – the flower
is red. The converse occurs in acidic soil, and so
the flower is blue. The plant is unique in thus
acting as a pH indicator.
What plant/flower?

The term in its current meaning was popularized
in 2000 by atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize
winner Paul Crutzen. 1945 is the most common
date proposed by scientists for its start (due to
the start of the Nuclear age) but dates as wide
apart as 900 AD, 1950 AD and 2000 AD have
been considered.
Andy Revkin, a New York Times columnist and
writer for the dotearth blog proposed a similar
term in 1992, but that name never took off.
What are we talking about?

Anthropocene
(Revkin proposed Anthrocene)

This is a Kodak camera from 1914. What is it
called OR what is its USP, something that is
common and automatic these days?

ABP is a preservation and tracking of
information such as age, sex, history of exposure
to higher elevations, intake of over the counter
meds, dates of participation among other things.
It is the end result of limits of indirect markers
introduced in the 1990's, longitudinal medical
records introduced by some sports organisations
etc.
If a model that links cause and effect is available
from empirical data obtained in a longitudinal
clinical trial, Bayes’ theorem can be used to
follow the direction that is opposite to that of
causality.

Athletic Biological/Blood Passport

2018 KQA Science Quiz -- Finals

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