Science Quiz Mains

(Utkansh’15)

QM : Sujit J Patil

Round 1

Infinite Bounce

• The African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) is a species of African aquatic frog which are commonly found in south-eastern portion of Sub-Saharan Africa.

• It is widely used for research purposes owing to its large oocytes. In fact, the first vertebrate ever to be cloned was an African clawed frog.

• In 1930, a scientist based in Cape Town, South Africa, named Lancelot Hogben while working on these frogs developed the Hogben test. This test was one of the first scientifically proven test for detection of _______. But the development of new testing methods in the 1960s made the Hogben test obsolete.

• Fill the blank.

1)

• Pregnancy

• Deinococcus radiodurans is an extremophilic bacterium, one of the most radiation-resistant organisms known. It can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid and has been listed as the world's most radiation-resistant lifeform in The Guinness Book Of World Records.

• Due to its resistance(or toughness), it has been given a special nickname after a fictional hero.

• Three films have been released on this fictional hero : in 1982, 1984 and 2011. The 1982 film had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role.

• What is the nickname?

2)

• Conan the Bacterium

• This is a small village situated in Sweden. Four elements discovered here are named after this town : Atomic number – 39,65,68 and 70.

• Name this village.

3)

• Ytterby

– 39 : Yttrium

– 65 : Terbium

– 68 : Erbium

– 70 : Ytterbium

• Lithium citrate is a chemical compound of lithium and citrate that is used as a mood stabilizer in psychiatric treatment of manic states and bipolar disorder.

• The soft drink ______ was originally named “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” when it was formulated in 1929 because it contained lithium citrate.

• The beverage was a patent medicine marketed as a cure for hangover. Lithium citrate was removed from the soft drink in 1948.

• Which soft drink is this ?

4)

• 7 Up

• In Latin a bunch of grapes was called _______. In 1822 Kestnerisolated an acid from grapes, and Gay-Lussac called it X acid. It was in all respects chemically identical to tartaric acid, except that it did not rotate polarised light, a phenomenon described by Jean-Baptiste Biot, who postulated molecular asymmetry.

• Later Louis Pasteur crystallised it and saw in his microscope that it contained two types of crystal, left handed and right handed; when he physically teased them apart he found that a solution of one behaved like ordinary tartaric acid, while a solution of the other rotated light in the opposite direction. X acid, being a mixture of the two, was neutral to polarised light.

• What is X ?

5)

• Racemic acid

• Animal magnetism was the name given by the German doctor Franz Mesmer to what he believed to be an invisible natural force, (a magnetic fluid) present in animals. He believed that the force could have physical effects, including healing.

• In 1784, King Louis XVI appointed five commissioners from the Royal Academy of Sciences to investigate animal magnetism. These included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, and the American ambassador ____________, who ultimately concluded that there was no such magnetic fluid.

• Fill the blank.

6)

• Benjamin Franklin

• Churchill fell ill in Carthage in Tunisia in 1943. The Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post on 21 December 1943 wrote that he had been saved by ________. Instead he was saved by the new sulphonamide drug, Sulphapyridine, known at the time under the research code M&B 693. In a subsequent radio broadcast, Churchill referred to the new drug as “This admirable M&B”.

• It is highly probable that the correct information about the sulphonamide did not reach the newspapers because, since the original sulphonamide antibacterial, Prontosil, had been discovered by the German laboratory Bayer, and as Britain was at war with Germany at the time, it was thought better to raise British morale by associating Churchill's cure with the British discovery, _______.

7)

• Penicillin

• trans-4,5-Epoxy-(E)-2-decenal is an oxygenated α,β-unsaturated aldehyde found in mammalian blood. It is permitted as a food flavouring in the EU.

• What important role does it have for the predators, who need to find and locate their prey ?

8)

• It gives the blood its characteristic smell, which helps the predators to find prey

• Sir Arthur Eddington was the most distinguished British astrophysicist in the 1930s.

• X was a young physicist who had a theory explaining what happens to stars when their nuclear fuel runs out. His calculations showed that if a star was large enough it literally collapsed into ‘nothing’ of huge mass and gravitational pull, or simply, a black hole.

• Eddington vehemently disagreed with X and ridiculed him at a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society. He said X's ideas were "stellar buffoonery". Eddington thought stars ended their lives as lumps of metal called white dwarves.

• The result of the dispute was that the science of astronomy was put on hold for thirty years. X was hurt and left Cambridge University for the United States . He also changed his topic of research and it was three decades before his theory was proved right. Eddington died in 1944 and never retracted his attack on X. Identify X.

9)

• S. Chandrasekhar

• X solution is a mixture of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), used to clean organic residues off substrates. Because the mixture is a strong oxidizing agent, it will remove most organic matter from a sample.

• It was named so because large quantities of organic residues immersed in it are dehydrated so violently that the process resembles a X feeding frenzy.

• The second and more definitive rationale for the name, however, is the ability of it to "eat anything," including in particular elemental carbon in the form of soot or char.

• Identify X.

10)

• Piranha solution

Round 2

Differential Scoring

• In 1957, a soil sample from a pine forest on the French Riviera was brought for analysis to the Lepetit Pharmaceuticals research lab in Milan, Italy. There, a research group headed by Prof. Piero Sensi and Dr. Maria Teresa Timbal discovered a new bacterium.

• This new species appeared immediately of great scientific interest since it was producing a new class of molecules with antibiotic activity. Because Sensi, Timbal and the researchers were particularly fond of this 1955 French movie, they decided to call these compounds “_________”. Fill the blank.

1)

Image :

• Rifamycins

• X is a potent poison extracted from Castor beans. It takes its name from the scientific name of the castor plant.

• X has been used on several occasions as a tool for terrorism and assassinations. For example, on May 29, 2013 two anonymous letters sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg contained traces of it. A letter was also alleged to have been sent to American President Barack Obama at the same time.

• Identify X, which acts by inhibiting ribosomes and hence protein synthesis ?

2)

• Ricin

• In Greece, X was known by the name chalkos. Aphrodite and Venus represented X in mythology and alchemy, because of its lustrous beauty, its ancient use in producing mirrors, and its association with the island, Y which was sacred to the goddess.

• Due to its use in mirrors, its alchemy symbol also looks like a mirror.

• X derives its name from Y. Identify X and Y.

3)

• X – Copper

• Y – Cyprus

• The ulnar nerve is a nerve that runs from the neck all the way to the hand, where it innervates several muscles in the hand and forearm and ends in two branches that innervate the pinkie and half of the ring finger.

• It has a two-word nickname. Regarding the origin of this nickname, there are two sides. One side says that it's an anatomical pun, because the nerve runs along the humerus, which sounds like "humorous." The other side claims that the nerve got its nickname because of the funny (as in odd) feeling one experiences after hitting it.

• What’s the nickname, which also forms a part of a commonly used phrase ?

4)

• Funny bone (to tickle someone's funny bone)

• This is a sweetly scented, highly poisonous woodland flowering plant. It is a symbol of humility in religious painting. It is considered the sign of Christ's second coming.

• According to a 2003 research, its odor, specifically the ligand bourgeonal, attracts mammal sperm. But in 2012, a study demonstrated instead that at high concentrations, bourgeonal imitated the role of progesterone in stimulating sperm to swim (chemotaxis), a process unrelated to odor reception.

• It can be seen here as well :

5)

Image :

Kate Middleton with it

Walter White staring at it

• Lily of the Valley/Mary's tears

• 2,147,483,647 was the largest known prime number until 1867. The primality of this number was proven by Leonhard Euler.

• Connect this number to “Gangnam Style” and the “Year 2038 problem/Unix Millennium Bug”.

6)

• It’s the highest value possible in 32-bit systems

– When Gangnam Style reached this many views, YouTube had to upgrade their technology

– The furthest time that a signed 32-bit integer can represent the Unix time format is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 (2,147,483,647 seconds after 1 January 1970).

Way back in 1864, German chemist Adolph von Baeyer combined malic acid isolated from apples with urea from urine to make ________.

Claims of origin of its name :

• Its origin lies in the Latin barba, for “beard,” since at the time chemists would supposedly shake their beards over a solution that refused to crystallize. Bits of dandruff or perhaps crystals from previous experiments acted as “seeds” around which crystals could form.

• Another theory is that a waitress named Barbara had provided the urine sample that was used to isolate the required urea.

• The most reasonable story is that on the day von Baeyer first synthesized it, he had visited a local tavern where soldiers were hoisting a few pints in honor of St. Barbara, the patron saint of artillerists and miners.

7)

• Barbiturates

• The Four Great Inventions are inventions from ancient China that are celebrated in Chinese culture for their historical significance and as symbols of ancient China's advanced science and technology.

• Identify all.

8)

Hint : next slide

• Gunpowder

• Printing

• Paper making

• Compass

• X strung some freshly dissected frog legs on a brass wire that he attached to the iron fence in front of his house. Then he waited for lightning to strike. It didn’t. But something else did happen. The frog legs swayed back and forth in the breeze, and every time they touched the iron fence they twitched uncontrollably. He hypothesized that somehow, electricity was stored in the frogs’ muscles and it could be released under certain conditions. “Animal electricity,” he called it.

• Y, X’s countryman and a professor of physics at the University of Paviasearched for an alternate explanation for the frog legs’ activity in the thunderstorm and soon found it. The electricity had not come from the frogs; it had come from the brass support and the iron fence.

• Identify X and Y.

9)

• X - Galvani

• Y - Volta

• In January 1848, Horace Wells self-experimented with chloroform for a period of four weeks. One day, delirious, Wells rushed out into the street and threw sulfuric acid over the clothing of two women. He was jailed. As the influence of the drug waned, Wells' mind started to clear. In despair, he realized the horror of what he had done. Wells requested the Guards to escort him to his house to pick up his shaving kit, then committed suicide, slitting an artery in his leg with a razor after inhaling an analgesic dose of chloroform to blot out the pain.

• Which other chemical’s anesthetic properties did he discover ?

10)

• Nitrous Oxide, the laughing gas

Round 3

Google Doodles on Scientists

1)

• Robert Noyce

2)

• Hans Christian Oersted

3)

• Jan Evangelista Purkinje

4)

• Léon Foucault

5)

• John Venn

6)

• Pierre De Fermat

Round 4

Long Visual Connect

1)50/-25

Sylvester H. Roper

2)45/-22.5

William Bullock

3)40/-20

Max Valier

4)35/-17.5

Valerian Abakovsky

5)30/-15

James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton

6)25/-12.5

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier

7)20/-10

Thomas Midgley, Jr.

8)15/-7.5

Thomas Andrews

9)10/-5

Franz Reichelt

10) 5/0

Marie Curie

• Inventors/Designers killed by their own creation

1. Sylvester H. Roper : steam-powered bicycle2. William Bullock : rotary printing press3. Max Valier : liquid-fuelled rocket engines4. Valerian Abakovsky : Aerowagon5. James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton : Scottish Maiden 6. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier : Rozière balloon7. Thomas Midgley, Jr. : an elaborate system of ropes and

pulleys to help others lift him from bed.8. Thomas Andrews : Shipbuilder of Titanic9. Franz Reichelt : the coat parachute10. Marie Curie : Radium and Polonium

Thank You