ATMOS 2013- SciTech Quiz

THE ATMOS SCI-TECH QUIZ
Prelims

RULES
•
•
•
•
•

21 questions on total.
* marked, to be used in case of ties.
Do not shout out answers.
Malpractices -> straight DQ.
No negatives for wrong answers- feel
free to guess.

1. What?
I swear by Apollo, the
healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea, and I
take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to
keep according to my ability and my
judgment, the following Oath and agreement: ...

ANSWER
• The Hippocratic Oath

2.

The X was a proposed "high concept" smartphone announced
by Canonical Ltd. on 22 July 2013 which had features like 4GB
RAM, 128GB storage and saphire crystal display.
Canonical was seeking to crowdfund a production run of
around 40,000 units through Indiegogo.
It had the highest target of any crowdfunded project to
date, $32,000,000 over a one-month campaign. It was not
intended to go into mass production after the initial run, but
rather to serve as a demonstration for new technologies for the
industry. It fell short of its funding goal, raising only
$12,809,906 and ultimately scrapped.

Name X.

3.

This word, derived from Latin genitive plural form of
‘who’, refers to the minimum number of members
necessary for an assembly to function. A similar but
unrelated word is the name of a website founded by
the people in the picture. Give either word.

4.
• David Saltzberg is a professor of Physics an Astronomy
at the University f California, LA.
• He received a Sloan Fellowship , NSF Career Award and
Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator
Award while an assistant professor.
• Saltzberg earned a bachelors degree in physics in 1989
from Princeton University and Ph.D. in Physics from the
University of Chicago in 1994. From 1995-97 he worked
at CERN in Switzerland.
• He now does something very different….
• What does he do?

ANSWER
• Technical director on The Big Bang Theory

5

In engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, X is any fictional, extremely
rare, costly, or impossible material, or device needed to fulfill a given design for a given
application.
The properties of any particular X depend on the intended use. For example, a pulley
made of X might be massless and frictionless; however, if used in a nuclear rocket, X
would be light, strong at high temperatures, and resistant to radiation damage.
In Y, X was supposed to be a potent source of energy which sells for many millions a
kilo.
Z is the place in Y where X was found.

Name X, Y and Z.

ANSWER
• Unobtainium from Avatar, Na’vi

*6.
• It is at 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, and
maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department.
• It has been noted by The Guinness Book of World Records,
Ripley's Believe It or Not!, and General Electric.
• It is often cited as evidence for the existence of planned
obsolescence in later produced of its ilk.
• Previously, it had only been off for short periods, such as a
week in 1937 for a renovation, short power outages, etc.
• What?

ANSWER
• The Centennial Light is the world's longestlasting light bulb.

ANSWER
• The Pixar Image Computer. Pixar was initially a
part hardware company. This was their
“flagship” graphics computer, which bombed
because it was a bit too expensive.

*9.
• Description from howstuffworks.com:
• A piston fires. The next piston fires at 315° .
There is a 415° gap. A piston fires. The next
piston fires at 315°. There is a 415° gap and
the cycle continues.
• What is being described?

ANSWER
• Harley Davidson engine

11
• At the age of 16, he became a cadet in the École
Polytechnique in Paris, where his classmates included
Michel Chasles and Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis.
• He became an officer in the French army's corps of
engineers.
• His father Lazare had served as Napoleon's minister of
the interior during the "Hundred Days", and after
Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 Lazare was forced into
exile.
• Lazare chose his son's third given name (by which he
would always be known) after the Persian poet ___ of
Shiraz.
• Which illustrious man of science is this?

ANSWER
• Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

12.
• The aim of the whole project is to increase the
number of green areas that, subsequently, help
reduce carbon dioxide emission and increase
overall vegetation and biodiversity in trafficcongested cities.
• Landscape artist Marc Grañén, in collaboration
with Grupo IRACO, has started implementing his
project on the streets of L’Estartit near
Girona, Spain.
• What unique idea is it?

ANSWER
• Rooftop Gardens on buses

13.
What is the only type of invention
for which the US Patent Office still
insists on seeing a working model?

ANSWER
• Perpetual Motion Machine

14.
• The picture of the third generation Pokemon
known as Deoxys is in the next slide.
• Pokedex number 386
• What is the inspiration to this?

ANSWER
• The sound of dialup internet

ANSWER
• Wildbeest migration

17.
• World’s largest what at retail store American
Science and Surplus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

18.
• This Da-Vinci illustration is said to be the first
time X was conceived. What is X?

19. An easy one
• Percy Spencer, an American engineer was
working on a radar set when he found that the
peanut chocolate bar in his pocket had
melted.
• What did he invent as a result?

ANSWER
• Saturn in different mythologies

*21.
• A mathematical symbol owes its name to the
musical instrument shown. Name the
symbol, name the instrument.

ANSWER
• Nabla, the hebrew word for a harp. Commonly
called the “del” operator.

THE ATMOS SCI-TECH QUIZ
FINALS

ROUND 1
CLOCKWISE.
+10,-10 ON POUNCE.
+10,-0 ON THE DIRECT.

* Q1. Start with a Tribute *
 A transporter is a fictional teleportation machine

used in the Star Trek universe. Transporters convert
a person or object into an energy pattern (a process
called dematerialization), then "beam" it to a
target, where it is reconverted into matter
(rematerialization). Considering most of the
audience for this show consisted of geeky scientists
and engineers, a certain addition was incorporated to
allow the above mentioned device to "work". Put
Funda. Its workable.

ANSWER
 Heisenberg‟s corrector.

2.
 1. Height at the beginning of its parabolic arc, that

is, when it left the body.

 2. Tangent of the angle at which the first incidence occurs
 3. Tangent of the angle at which the second incidence

occurs.

 4. Horizontal distance of the first trajectory.
 5, Horizontal distance of the second trajectory.

 Given a reasonable sample space, and these 5

parameters, why is the formula of use for forensics?

ANSWER
 Blood Spatter analysis
 If enough of the pairs of drops approximately agree

(indicating that they flew off the victim at a similar
angle), then the investigator can say definitively how
high the blood was when it exited the body—which
could prove a person‟s position when struck.
 blood arcs in a parabola, and different parabolic

paths from varied heights can end at the same angle.

3.
 Identify and connect the 3 pics.

ANSWER
 When Anders Celsius invented the temperature

scale, he put 100 degrees as the point for freezing
and 0 degrees as the point for boiling. Carl
Linnaeus, waited until Celsius had died to invert the
scale to the way we read it today.

4.
 This is a ring worn by Canadian ___________ and

it is called _______ Ring. It reminds them of their
duties.
 A ritual was developed with the assistance of English
poet Rudyard Kipling to „present‟ the ring.
 FITB and funda.

ANSWER
 This is a ring worn by Canadian Engineers and it is

called the Iron Ring. It reminds them of their duties.
 The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer is a ritual

for students about to graduate from an engineering
program at a university in Canada. The need for the
ritual was patently obvious in the light of the Quebec
Bridge disasters.

5.
 What is blocked out? and also tell us why this Linux

distribution was special? And why that name?

ANSWER
 Yggdrasil Linux described itself as a "Plug-and-Play"

Linux distribution, automatically configuring itself
for the hardware.
 Yggdrasil is the World Tree of Norse mythology. The
name was chosen because Yggdrasil took disparate
pieces of software and assembled them into a
complete product. Yggdrasil's company motto was
"Free Software For The Rest of Us".

7. impossibility in its purest form
 Stamps commemorating whom? Who else did

something similar a lot later?

 Oscar Reutersvärd.
 The mathematician Roger Penrose independently re-

created the Penrose triangle impossible figure years
later.

ANSWER
 Dust- CounterStrike

9.
 The X contest is annually held at Purdue University. The

X is named after cartoonist X, the spirit of whose work
inspires the contest's weird machines and crazy
mechanism. His inventions became so widely known that
Webster's Dictionary added “X" to its listing, defining it
as "accomplishing by extremely complex, roundabout
means what seemingly could be done simply.“
 Every year the contestants are given simple mundane
tasks like watering a plant, washing a plate and so on.The
winners are the guys who achieve this task in the most
complicated way.
 X?

ANSWER
 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest

10.
 1 and 2 started 3 (logo shown) which has caused

huge hue and cry amongst both geeks and artists.
Identify them, and what did they start?

ANSWER
 Wikipedia Art
 A „conceptual artwork‟ by artists Scott Kildall and

Nathaniel Stern, where they edit Wikipedia pages in
a way that makes them „artistic‟.
 People over at Wikipedia, Jimbo downwards, are
pissed because it messes up all that Wikipedia stands
for. And the art world is pissed at Wikipedia for
being such prudes and pedants.

11. Just for the heck of it!
 Whose voice?

ANSWER
 Alexander Graham Bell

12.
 Montmartre is a hill in the north of Paris. This

hilltop location has been made famous in some of the
more famous French movies like Amelie and Moulin
Rouge.

 The surroundings are said to have inspired Dali and

Van Gogh among others.

 Apart from the fact that the fossil of an extinct

equine was discovered about a century ago, this place
features in today‟s quiz for another reason. What?

ANSWER
 Plaster of Paris was discovered there!

This lady is Mitchell Baker, often identified
due to her unconventional hairstyle, which is
said to be her tribute to her post. What post
does(rather, did) she hold and what is the deal
with her hair?

13

ANSWER
The ex-CEO of Mozilla Corporation . Her
hairstyle looks like the firefox logo 

COMIC CON
5 QUESTIONS.
WRITTEN.
+5 FOR EACH.

ANSWER
 Cat‟s Schrodinger

BACK TO SQUARE ONE
ANTICLOCKWISE.
+10,-10 ON POUNCE.
+10,-0 ON THE DIRECT.

1.
X is a Taiwanese multi-national company that sells and
markets consumer electronics, computing and
communications devices. Its first mobile phone was M775C
and it has launched mobile phones ranging from
bar, clamshell to Windows mobile.
The slogan of the company is “bring enjoyment to life”.

2.

What is this and who makes
them?

ANSWER
 Google PageRank Algorithm

ANSWER
 The one and only SNAKE!

5.
 Two of the original lot did not survive the bombing in

World War II. Two others were later demolished and
replaced by a modern highway. The others
remain, although only two of them are from Euler's time
(one was rebuilt in 1935). Thus, as of 2000, there are
now five in Kaliningrad.
 Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, has
incorporated a model of these into a grass area between
the old Physical Sciences Library and the Erskine
Building, housing the Departments of
Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science.
 What am I talking about?

ANSWER
 The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg

Q6. 18,446,744,073,709,551,615
 The puzzle was first publicized in the West by the French

mathematician Édouard Lucas in 1883. There is a history
about an Indian temple in Kashi Vishwanath which
contains a large room with three diamond needles
surrounded by 64 golden disks. Brahmin priests, acting
out the command of an ancient prophecy, have been
moving these disks, in accordance with the immutable
rules of the Brahma, since that time. According to the
legend, when the last move of the puzzle will be
completed, the world will end.
 What‟s the name of the puzzle in question?

* Q7. Face it we‟ve all used it before *
It is built on two basic principles:
 A scheduling theory called rarest first, which creates
an even distribution of available pieces.
 A game theory strategy for persuading users to
engage in unselfish behavior: Reward cooperation
and punish cheating, Creator Bram Cohen calls these
the “Principles of Leech Resistance.”

Q8. Yahooo!
 “The principal components of _________ are

millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of
a human hair.
 In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains
positively charged white particles and negatively
charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid.
 When a negative electric field is applied, the white
particles move to the top of the microcapsule ....”
 What is being described?

Q9. One of the Assistants
 This product was first marketed by the Gem

Manufacturing Company of England.
 Norwegians, who believed that this was a Norwegian
invention, wore it on the lapel as a symbol of
resistance to the Nazis.
 What was it?

Q10. Factual, sadly
 Located near Leh in Ladakh, India. The hill is alleged

to have magnetic properties strong enough to pull
cars uphill and force passing aircraft to increase their
altitude in order to escape magnetic
interference, while in fact, this is a purely optical
effect caused by layout of the surroundings.

 Magnet hill! Illusion that it is uphill, but actually

downhill.

Q11.
 A hypothetical type of nuclear reaction that would

occur at, or near, room temperature, compared with
temperatures in the millions of degrees that is
required in reality. It has been rejected by the
mainstream scientific community because the
original experimental results could not be replicated
consistently and reliably.

12.
 The original formulation for X consisted of 1% CN gas in a









solvent of 2-butanol, propylene glycol, cyclohexene, and
dipropylene glycol methyl ether.
Chemical X is a tear gas in the form of an aerosol spray
which propels a lachrymatory agent mixed with a volatile
solvent.
This form of X is legal in very few countries, thus its use is
becoming uncommon. Most X branded products sold today
are Y rather than tear gas.
The active ingredient in Y is capsaicin, which is a chemical
derived from the fruit of plants in the Capsicum
genus, including chilis.
X and Y ?

 X- Pepper spray
 Y- Mace

13.
X do indeed have a much higher ______ resistance than
vertebrates, with the lethal dose perhaps 6 to 15 times that for
humans.
However, they are not exceptionally ______-resistant compared to
other insects, such as the fruit fly.
The X's ability to withstand ______ better than human beings can
be explained through the cell cycle.
Cells are most vulnerable to the effects of ______ when they are
dividing. A X's cells divide only once each time it molts, which is
weekly at most in a juvenile X.
Since not all X would be molting at the same time, many would be
unaffected by an acute ______ but lingering ______ would still be
harmful.
This is the scientific explanation for what ?

 Cockroaches surviving nuke attacks.

14.
 Zbtb7 is a gene that may act as a master switch for

cancer, and is responsible for the proliferation of
cancer throughout surrounding cells.
 The gene is unique in that it is needed for other
oncogenes to cause cancer.
 Discovery of the gene was first published in the
January 2005 issue of Nature.
 It was originally called "POK erythroid myeloid
ontogenic factor" but was renamed to Zbtb7.

ANSWER
 POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor~~

POKemon!
 Nintendo‟s lawsuit, et al.

15.
 When John Glenn was orbiting in the Friendship 7 in

1962,he took a short speech with him rendered
phonetically
 I am a stranger. I come in peace. Take me to your

leader, and there will be a massive reward for you in
eternity."

ANSWER
 When John Glenn went into orbit aboard Friendship

7 in 1962, mission planners weren‟t certain where
he‟d come down. The most likely sites were
Australia, the Atlantic Ocean, and New Guinea, but it
might be 72 hours before he could be picked up.

 Glenn worried about spending three days among

aborigines who had seen a silver man emerge from “a
big parachute with a little capsule on the end,” so he
took with him a short speech rendered phonetically
in several languages.

16.
 The below excerpt is the Physics behind which common object










?
Lift is generated in primarily the same way as a traditional
asymmetric airfoil, that is, by accelerating upper airflow such
that a pressure difference gives rise to a lifting force.
Small ridges near the leading edge act as turbulators, reducing
flow separation by forcing the airflow to become turbulent
after it passes over the ridges.
The rotating ____ has a vertical angular momentum
vector, stabilizing its attitude gyroscopically.
Depending on the cross-sectional shape of the airfoil the
amount of lift generated by the front and back parts of the
may be unequal.
If the ____ were not spinning this would tend to make it
pitch.

 When the ____ is spinning, however, such a torque would

cause it to precess about the roll axis, causing its trajectory to
curve to the left or the right.
 Most ____ are designed to be aerodynamically stable so that
this roll is self-correcting for a fairly broad range of velocities
and rates of spin.
 Many ____ however, are intentionally designed to be
unstable. Higher rates of spin lead to better stability and, for a
given rate of spin, there is generally a range of velocities that
are stable.
 Even a slight deformation in a ____ (called a "Taco," which in
extreme cases looks like a tacoshell) can cause adverse effects
when throwing long range. It can be observed by holding the
____ horizontally at eye level and looking at the rim while
slowly rotating the ____

17.
 Small cylindrical mammals adapted to a subterranean









lifestyle. They have velvety fur; tiny or invisible ears and eyes;
and short, powerful limbs with large paws oriented for
digging.
A melanocytic nevus (aka "Nevocytic nevus") is a type of
lesion that contains nevus cells (melanocytes).
The majority of these appear during the first two decades of a
person‟s life, while about one in every 100 babies is born with
one.
A massive structure, usually of stone, used as a
pier, breakwater, or a causeway between places separated by
water.
The word comes from Middle French and ultimately Latin
meaning a large mass, especially of rock.
What connects ?

18.
 It is a natural carotenoid chemical compound that is








found in the flowers crocus and gardenia. has a deep red
color & forms crystals with a melting point of 186 °C.
When dissolved in water, it forms an orange solution. It
is the chemical ingredient primarily responsible for the
color of saffron.
It has been shown to be a potent antioxidant and anticarcinogenic.
In rodents, it has been shown to have antidepressant
properties and one study reports aphrodisiac properties.
What ?

ATMOS 2013- SciTech Quiz

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