The document appears to be a science quiz containing multiple choice questions about topics in various fields of science including astronomy, chemistry, biology and physics. It includes questions about dendroclimatology, Einstein-Rosen bridges, camouflage in zebras, elements discovered by early chemists, flamingo coloring, Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, courtship rituals of penguins, Google doodles honoring scientists' birthdays, James Clerk Maxwell's early work, JBS Haldane's views on God, the early biotech company Genentech, Indian physicist Thanu Padmanabhan, the stimulant caffeine, the solar system, carbon dating pioneer Willard Libby, the Miller

1. Anvesha
presents
SCIENCE QUIZ-2013

2. NORMAL STUFF

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

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

5. What would one find at the ends of the ‘EinsteinRosen Bridge’?

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

7. 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?

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

9. 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?

10. Answer:
Tellurium, Latin Tellus meaning earth

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

12. Answer:
The flamingo

13. 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.

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

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

16. ANSWER
A pebble, to start nest building!

17. GOOGLE DOODLE

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

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

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

25. Answer:
Neils Bohr’s birthday

27. Answer:
Pierre de fermat’s 410th birthday

29. Answer:
Thomas Alva Edison

30. MIXED BAG

31. 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?
31

32. 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.
32

33. 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
33

34. 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.

35. 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 lifeforms.
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.

36. 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

37. Answer:
DNA

38. 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, AlKhwarizmi 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.

39. Answer:
Tanu Padmanabhan

40. 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?

41. Answer:
Caffeine

42. 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?

43. 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.

44. PICTURE ROUND

45. Connect.

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

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

49. What did Willard Libby do?

50. Answer:
Radio carbon dating

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

52. 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

53. ID this guy.

55. ID this person

56. Answer:
M.S.Swaminathan

57. VIDEO ROUND

58. Will Drinking Alcohol Help You Feel Warmer?

59. 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.

60. Can Your Cell Phone Interfere With A Planes Instruments?

61. 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.

62. Can Combining Diet Coke And Mentos Make
Your Stomach Explode?

63. 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.

64. Is it possible to beat a Thermal camera?

65. 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, heatresistant 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.

66. How does a xerox machine work?

67. 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.

68. Does The Color Red Really Make Bulls Angry?

69. The red, blue and white flags got equal, halfhearted 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.