Torquest ’13The science and technology quiz

Conducted by – Omkar Yarguddi

Final round

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

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.

Lets get started!

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?

Answer

•Trinity Nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico

Funda?

Q.2

Answer

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?

Answer

• Michael Faraday

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?

Answer

• X- Superconductor; Y- Superconductivity

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?

Answer

• Inland Taipan

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?

Answer

• X- PotentialY- Potential difference / Voltage

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?

Answer

• Dr. Sheldon Cooper

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.

Answer

• Minority game

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

Answer

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

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.

Answer

• 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.

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?

Answer

• C- Radio carbon datingX- Carbon 14Y- Carbon 12

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.

Answer

• AVR

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.

Answer

• X- Elise AndrewFacebook page- I fucking love science

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?

Answer

• Leyden jar

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?

Answer

• X - NarcissicismY - Narcissistic number

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?

Answer

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

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.

Answer

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

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?

Answer

• pH meter

Long Visual Connect

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.

Set 1

• +50 / - 40

Set 2

• +40 / - 30

Set 3

• +30 / - 20

Set 4

• +20 / - 10

Set 5

• +10 / - 0

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

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?

Answer

• Sucralose

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.

Answer

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

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?

Answer

• Tangling of headphones/wires inside pockets

Q. 22• Connect:

1. Mo2. The angle rounded to whole degrees for which a rainbow appears3. Time required for a gravity train journey4. *5. The Orion Nebula

Answer

• 42

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?

Answer

• Cold Fusion

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?

Answer

• Uncertainty principle

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?

Answer

• Amdahl's law

Q. 26• Connect:

1. a weighted sum of sinusoids having a common period2. the type of linear canonical transform that is the generalization of 13. a special case of the Z-transform around the unit circle in the complex plane4. 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.

Answer

• Connect is “Fourier”1 - Fourier series

2 - Fourier transform3- Discrete time Fourier transform

4 - Fourier's law

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?

Answer

• Maxwell's Demon

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:HAICAN HAS STDIO?VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"KTHXBYE

X?

Answer

• LOLCODE

Q. 29• Connect:

1. The Demon-Haunted World2. The Dragons of Eden3. A Path Where No Man Thought4. Broca's Brain5. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors6. Contact7. The Varieties of Scientific Experience8. The Cosmic Connection9. Comet10. Pale Blue Dot

Answer

• Books by Carl Sagan

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?

Answer

• DuckduckgoThe blanks are

X - Google and Y - search engine respectively

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.

Visual

Answer

• X - LeucismY - AlbinismZ - Melanin

Q. 32• ID all the people in the photograph on the next slide. What is

so special about them?

Answer

• From Left to right: Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong

First men to walk on the moon.

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?

Answer

• Linus Pauling

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.

Answer • __X__'s __Y__ - Gray's Anatomy

__A__'s __Y__ - Grey's Anatomy

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?

Answer

• 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

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?

Answer

• Gunpowder