Presentation of the final round of Torquest ’13 conducted at MindSpark '13, College of Engineering Pune. By- Omkar Yarguddi

1. Torquest ’13
The science and technology quiz
Conducted by – Omkar Yarguddi
Final round

2. Special thanks...
• Mohit Karve
• Vibhav Bhave
• Payas Awadhutkar
• Rohan Danait
• Amit Patil

3. Rules
• 36 Questions, each for 10 points
• Infinite rebounds
• Pounce
• Part points at Quizmaster’s discretion
• Long Connect after Q. 18.
• The decision of the Quizmaster shall be final and binding and
cannot be challenged.

4. Lets get started!

5. Q.1
• Alamogordo Glass is a glassy residue primarily composed of
arkosic sand composed of quartz grains and feldspar that was
melted by the cause of it's formation. It is usually a light
green, although colour can vary. It is mildly radioactive, but is
safe to handle. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, samples
were gathered and sold to mineral collectors as a novelty.
Traces of the material may be found at the site of origin even
today, although most of it was bulldozed and buried in 1953.
It is now illegal to take the remaining material from the site;
however, material that was taken prior to this prohibition is
still in the hands of collectors. How was this Alamogordo Glass
formed?

6. Answer

7. •Trinity Nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo, New
Mexico

8. Funda?
Q.2

10. Answer

12. Q.3
• X's earliest chemical work was specifically involved in the
study of chlorine. He discovered two new compounds of
chlorine and carbon. X also invented an early form of what
was to become the Bunsen burner. One of his most important
discoveries is that of a cyclic compound which he called
bicarburet of hydrogen (not its current name). His
experiments on liquefying of gases helped to establish that
gases are the vapours of liquids possessing a very low boiling
point. He also made great contributions to electrolysis.
However, he is best known for his contributions to an entirely
different discipline of science. Who?

13. Answer

14. • Michael Faraday

15. Q.4
• X- A material characterised by Meissner effect, London
Depth, Superdiamagnetism;
Y- A quantum mechanical phenomenon which causes certain
materials to transform to Xs under physical conditions specific
to that particular material.
X&Y?

16. Answer

17. • X- Superconductor;
Y- Superconductivity

18. Q.5
• Oxyuranus microlepidotus is regarded as the most venomous
land snake in the world based on LD50 (median Lethal Dose)
values in mice. It averages approximately 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) in
total length, although larger specimens can reach total lengths
of 2.5 metres (8.2 ft). Its venom consists mostly of
neurotoxins. It is a species native to Australia and there have
been no mentions of its occurrences in Taiwan or other
Polynesian islands. What is it commonly known as?

19. Answer

20. • Inland Taipan

21. Q.6
• X- a field defined in space, from which many important
physical properties may be derived. Examples include the
gravitational X and the electric X, from which the motion of
gravitating or electrically charged bodies may be obtained.
• Y- the work done per unit charge against a static electric field
to move the charge between two points.
• X & Y?

22. Answer

23. • X- Potential
Y- Potential difference / Voltage

24. Q.7
• X was interested in physics from an early age, and was a child
prodigy. He entered college at the age of eleven, and at age
fourteen, he graduated from college summa cum laude. From
then, he worked on his doctorate, was a visiting professor at
the University of Heidelberg in Germany and was the
youngest person at the time to receive the Stephenson
Award. He received his Ph.D. degree at sixteen years old, and
is now a theoretical physicist doing research at Caltech. Who?

25. Answer

26. • Dr. Sheldon Cooper

27. Q.8
• Kolkata Paise Restaurants, when they existed were extremely
popular among local labourers as they offered cheap and
tasty food. The problem however was they couldn't waste
much time on lunch, and many such places used to be
crowded. So the labourers always tried to form smaller groups
and choose uniquely, while large groups, if any, most of the
time went without food. This is a classic example of a game
theory problem. Name the problem.

28. Answer

29. • Minority game

30. Q.9
• X is a composite structure of the endoskeleton present in a
subgroup of chordate animals called "Craniata". It is
responsible for the protection of one of the most important
internal organs whose functions include Information
processing, perception, motor
control, arousal, homeostasis, motivation, etc. among many
others. It forms a protective cavity for the same. In humans it
is formed of 21 bones which are joined by rigid joints or
sutures permitting very little movement. What is X?
Hint: There are too many hints already given

31. Answer

32. • Cranium, not skull. Cranium is skull without the lower jaw or
mandible

33. Q.10
• As of July 2013, 100 million Korean users have suffered from
hacking attacks. The blame was put on a certain software.
While it is a topic of many facebook memes, Korean users
can't abandon it and switch over to some other software due
to a certain reason. Name the software and explain the
reason. Part points for naming either the software or the
reason.

34. Answer

35. • Internet Explorer.
Korea uses ActiveX, an identification platform which is
supported only by IE. So despite security compromises, many
Korean sites still run on IE.

36. Q.11
• C is a technique proposed and improved by Willard
Libby, used extensively in archaeology and dendrology. The
atmosphere contains X and its stable isotope Y in roughly
constant proportions (1.5 parts of X to 10^12 parts of Y). X is
constantly being produced in the lower stratosphere and
upper troposphere by cosmic rays, which generate neutrons
that in turn create X when they strike nitrogen-14 (14N)
atoms. In 1960, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in
chemistry for this work.
C? X? Y?

37. Answer

38. • C- Radio carbon dating
X- Carbon 14
Y- Carbon 12

39. Q.12
• The ___ is a modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single
chip microcontroller which was developed in 1996. Its
architecture was conceived by two students at the Norwegian
Institute of Technology, Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan. It
was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip
flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time
programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other
microcontrollers at the time. FITB.

40. Answer

41. • AVR

42. Q.13
• X started a Facebook page in March 2012, saying of the
creation that "I was always finding bizarre facts and cool
pictures and one day I decided to create somewhere to put
them – it was never supposed to be more than me posting to
a few dozen of my friends." After the first day of being on
Facebook, the page had over 1,000 likes, and passed 1 million
likes in September 2012. As of date, the page has more than
6.2 million likes. X's work with social media and science has
been covered by ScienceWorld, National
Geographic, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Maclean's, Geeked, The Huffington Post, CBS This
Morning, New York Daily News, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
X? Facebook page? No half points.

43. Answer

44. • X- Elise Andrew
Facebook page- I fucking love science

45. Q.14
• ______ ___ is a device that "stores" static electricity between
two electrodes on the inside and outside of a glass jar. It was
the original form of a capacitor (originally known as a
"condenser"). It was invented independently by German cleric
Ewald Georg von Kleist on 11 October 1745 and by Dutch
scientist Pieter van Musschenbroek of Leiden (Leyden) in
1745–1746. It was used to conduct many early experiments in
electricity, and its discovery was of fundamental importance
in the study of electricity. Previously, researchers had to resort
to insulated conductors of large dimensions to store a charge.
The ______ ___ provided a much more compact alternative.
What?

46. Answer

47. • Leyden jar

48. Q.15
• X - a term that originated with a character in Greek
mythology who fell in love with his own image reflected in a
pool of water.
Y - An n-digit number equal to the sum of the nth powers of
its digits, popularly known after Michael F. Armstrong, and is
also known by the adjective form of X.
X? Y?

49. Answer

50. • X - Narcissicism
Y - Narcissistic number

51. Q.16
• 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that
something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he
states that something is impossible, he is very probably
wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to
venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic.
What are they?

52. Answer

53. • Clarke's Laws (Arthur C. Clarke states them in his books)

54. Q.17
• Jules Verne was way ahead of his time in imagining things.
While we know he imagined the submarine in his famous
work 'Twenty Thousand Leagues under the sea' he did
imagine many more things. In his less famous "The End of
Nana Sahib: _____" he imagined something with which we
are pretty fascinated these days. The plot is simple - after the
rebellion of 1857, 3 British officers encounter Nana Sahib and
have many adventures in a special house. Take a look at its
image. Explain what Verne is showing us. If you can just fill in
the blank it is fine.

56. Answer

57. • The Steam House - that elephant is a machine running on
steam which pulls the house -> mecha/robots.

58. Q.18
• Arnold Orville Beckmann was an assistant professor at CalTech
in 1930s. At that time the fruit industry of California was
facing a crisis. Generous use of pesticides/fungicides affected
acid levels of land and as a result, inferior quality citrus fruits
were being produced. Beckmann was presented with a
challenge to solve this problem and he did; by producing a
device which perhaps some of you have used in chemistry lab.
What could it be?

59. Answer

60. • pH meter

61. Long Visual Connect

62. Rules
• Written round.
• Sets of two images each will be displayed.
• There is something very specific connecting the images. Find
out the connecting link.
• Scoring as indicated before each set.

63. Set 1
• +50 / - 40

65. Set 2
• +40 / - 30

67. Set 3
• +30 / - 20

69. Set 4
• +20 / - 10

71. Set 5
• +10 / - 0

73. Round reversal
• Questions in reverse order, from team 6 to team 1.
• Same rules as before.

74. Q. 19
• X is an artificial sweetener, which was discovered in 1976 by a
student, Shashikant Phadnis, and his supervisor at Queen
Elizabeth College. It is made by reacting sucrose with
chlorine, with original purpose of creating a DDT-like
insecticide. While researching ways to use sucrose and its
synthetic derivatives, the student was told to "test" a
chlorinated sugar compound, but he thought the supervisor
asked him to "taste" it, so he did. He found the compound to
be exceptionally sweet. At a first glance at its name, one
would think it was prepared by substituting an intermediate
carbon atom, in sucrose, with that of Aluminium. However, it
is not the carbon atom that is substituted, but the hydroxyl
group, with chlorine atoms. X?

75. Answer

76. • Sucralose

77. Q. 20
• ____ is a cell type in an immortal cell line used in scientific
research & is the oldest and most commonly used human cell
line.The line was derived from cervical cancer cells taken on
February 8, 1951, from Henrietta Lacks, a patient who
eventually died of her cancer on October 4, 1951. ____ cells
have been used for "research into polio, cancer, AIDS, the
effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and
many other scientific pursuits". Recently, the ____ cells were
in spotlight on account of an agreement between the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Lacks family with provision
such that the cells will continue to be used and genetically
sequenced, but the Lacks family and Henrietta’s contribution
will be formally acknowledged in all publications. FITB.

78. Answer

79. • HeLa, named after Henrietta Lacks from whom the cells were
taken.

80. Q. 21
• Knot theory is a branch of topology dealing with the study of
mathematical knots. The visual on the following slide shows
an example of a mathematical knot called tree-foil knot. It
finds applications in a variety of areas. It is required to explain
sun's corona structure mathematically. Interestingly it also
explains the reason behind an everyday nuisance which has a
good possibility of happening right here right now!! Which
nuisance we are talking about?

82. Answer

83. • Tangling of headphones/wires inside pockets

84. Q. 22
• Connect:
1. Mo
2. The angle rounded to whole degrees for which a rainbow
appears
3. Time required for a gravity train journey
4. *
5. The Orion Nebula

85. Answer

86. • 42

87. Q. 23
• It was proposed to explain reports of anomalously high energy
generation under certain specific laboratory conditions. It
gained attention after reports in 1989 by Stanley Pons and
Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world's leading
electrochemists, that their apparatus had produced
anomalous heat, of a magnitude they asserted would defy
explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They
further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction
by-products, including neutrons and tritium. The small
tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on
the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode. What was the
hypothesis known as?

89. Answer

90. • Cold Fusion

91. Q. 24
• The term observer effect refers to changes that the act of
observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. This
is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the
state of what they measure in some manner. A commonplace
example is checking the pressure in an automobile tire; this is
difficult to do without letting out some of the air, thus
changing the pressure. However, when we are dealing with
very small objects, it is not possible to observe a system
without changing the system, so the observer must be
considered part of the system being observed.
Historically, this effect has been confused with something else
which arises due to the matter wave nature of all objects on
such small scales. What is this 'something else' known as?

92. Answer

93. • Uncertainty principle

94. Q. 25
• X is used to find the maximum expected improvement to an
overall system when only part of the system is improved. It is
often used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical
maximum speedup using multiple processors & is a model for
the relationship between the expected speedup of
parallelized implementations of an algorithm relative to the
serial algorithm, under the assumption that the problem size
remains the same when parallelized. X?

95. Answer

96. • Amdahl's law

97. Q. 26
• Connect:
1. a weighted sum of sinusoids having a common period
2. the type of linear canonical transform that is the
generalization of 1
3. a special case of the Z-transform around the unit circle in
the complex plane
4. A law that states that the time rate of heat transfer through
a material is proportional to the negative gradient in the
temperature and to the area, at right angles to that
gradient, through which the heat is flowing.

98. Answer

99. • Connect is “Fourier”
1 - Fourier series
2 - Fourier transform
3- Discrete time Fourier transform
4 - Fourier's law

100. Q. 27
• Given below is a description of a thought experiment conceived as a way
of furthering the understanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
"if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can
follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as
essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us.
For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform
temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the
mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost
exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two
portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a
being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this
hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and
only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without
expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in
contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics"
What is this thought experiment more commonly known as?

102. Answer

103. • Maxwell's Demon

104. Q. 28
• X is an esoteric programming language inspired by the way cats on
the internet allegedly speak. The language was created in 2007 by
Adam Lindsay, researcher at the Computing Department of
Lancaster University. It is not clearly defined in terms of operator
priorities and correct syntax, but several functioning interpreters
and compilers already exist. One interpretation of the language has
been proven Turing-complete. Here is an example of a simple hello
world program written using X:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE
X?

105. Answer

106. • LOLCODE

107. Q. 29
• Connect:
1. The Demon-Haunted World
2. The Dragons of Eden
3. A Path Where No Man Thought
4. Broca's Brain
5. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
6. Contact
7. The Varieties of Scientific Experience
8. The Cosmic Connection
9. Comet
10. Pale Blue Dot

108. Answer

109. • Books by Carl Sagan

110. Q. 30
• We didn’t invest in it because we thought it would beat
___X__. We invested in it because there is a need for a private
____Y___. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that
hang out on Reddit and Hacker News.
- Fred Wilson, 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New
York. What is he talking about? Also, X & Y?

111. Answer

112. • Duckduckgo
The blanks are
X - Google and Y - search engine
respectively

113. Q. 31
• ____X___ is a condition characterized by reduced
pigmentation in animals caused by a recessive allele. Unlike
____Y____, it is caused by a reduction in all types of skin
pigment, not just ___Z___.
A major distinction between ____X____ and ___Y____ is the
colour of the eyes. Due to the lack of ___Z___ production in
both the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) and
iris, individuals suffering from ___Y____ typically have red
eyes due to the underlying blood vessels showing through. In
contrast, most animals which have ___X____ have normally
coloured eyes.
X? Y? Z?
X, Y, Z - Full points. Only Y & Z - Half points. Only Z - No points.

114. Visual

115. Answer

116. • X - Leucism
Y - Albinism
Z - Melanin

117. Q. 32
• ID all the people in the photograph on the next slide. What is
so special about them?

119. Answer

120. • From Left to right: Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil
Armstrong
First men to walk on the moon.

121. Q. 33
• _____ _______ was an American chemist, biochemist, peace
activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential
chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists
of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the fields of
quantum chemistry and molecular biology.For his scientific work, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. In 1962, for his
peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This makes
him the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes. He
is one of only four individuals to have won more than one Nobel
Prize (the others being Marie Curie, John Bardeen, and Frederick
Sanger) and is also one of only two people to be awarded Nobel
Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie (Chemistry
and Physics). Who?

122. Answer

123. • Linus Pauling

124. Q. 34
• __X__'s __Y__ is an English-language human anatomy textbook
originally written by Henry __X__. Earlier editions were called
Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical, but the book's name is
commonly shortened to, and later editions are titled, __X__'s
__Y__. The book is widely regarded as an extremely influential work
on the subject, and has continued to be revised and republished
from its initial publication in 1858 to the present day. The 40th
edition of the book was published in 2008.
__A__'s __Y__ is an American television medical drama that
premiered on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The
series has aired nine seasons, and focuses on the fictional lives of
surgical interns and residents as they gradually evolve into
seasoned doctors, while trying to maintain personal lives.
Gimme both __X__'s __Y__ and __A__'s __Y__. No part points.

125. Answer
• __X__'s __Y__ - Gray's Anatomy
__A__'s __Y__ - Grey's Anatomy

126. Q. 35
• This North American member of felidae finds itself attached
to the world of computers, thanks to a microprocessor
company which made use of its name in various series of its
products. It was succeeded by Jaguar recently this year. Our
friend also appears in native American folklore paired with
the Coyote - the pair acts as fog and wind. Some of the US
sports teams prefer to add it as a suffix to their names, like
Ohio ____. What are we talking about?

127. Answer

128. • Bobcat.
It is a cat family mammal found from Canada to Mexico.
The company talked about is AMD - they named their micro
architecture as Bobcat.
Ohio Bobcats is name of Ohio University's varsity team

129. Q. 36
• The first reference to the incendiary properties of such
mixtures is the passage of the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, a
Taoist text tentatively dated to the mid-9th century AD "Some
have heated together sulphur, realgar and saltpetre with
honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces
have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were
working burned down." What?

130. Answer

131. • Gunpowder