TURING TEST

Science and technology

1. Which chemical element has the shortest name?

2. Which chemical element has the longest name?

3. Four elements are named after the same village in Sweden. Which are they, and what is the name of the village?

image 4. How many elements are gases at room temperature and pressure?

5. “O be a fine girl, kiss me” is a mnemonic for what?

6. Which astronomical object was discovered on January 1st 1801?

7. What links M1 and 1054?

8. Which gas makes up 1% of air?

9. Which five letters convert RNA into DNA?

10. On which group of crustaceans was Charles Darwin acknowledged as the world’s expert?

11. What colour is water?

12. What can be up or down, have charm, be strange or be either top or bottom?

13. Where in the human body would you find a pair of sea horses?

14. Where are the Islets of Langerhans?

15. Who wrote the following, and in what context: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”?

16. What distinguishes a eukaryotic cell from a prokaryotic one?

17. If talc=1, calcite=3, apatite=5 and quartz=7, what equals 9?

18. In which constellation is the middle of the Milky Way galaxy?

19. What is the most distant object in the universe discovered before the invention of telescopes?

20. After what are the Ordovician and Silurian geological periods named?

21. How old is the Earth?

22. How old is the universe?

23. Where would you find a Golgi apparatus?

24. What did the Michelson-Morley experiment show?

25. In which geological period did the dinosaurs depicted in the movie Jurassic Park live?

26. In 1905 Albert Einstein published four scientific papers. Two were on the theory of relativity and one on quantum theory. What was the other about?

27. To a chemist, what do the letters s, p, d and f have in common?

image 28. What is PSR B1257+12, and why is it historically significant?

29. How many carbon atoms are there in a buckyball (a molecule of buckminsterfullerene)?

30. After hydrogen and helium, what is the most common element in the universe?

31. Where is the Heaviside layer?

32. What does the “disposable soma” theory purport to explain?

33. What was the name of the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on a planet other than Earth?

34. Which of the sun’s eight planets has the most eccentric orbit?

image 35. What links geese, honeybees and sticklebacks?

36. Besides the Galapagos Islands, where is it still possible to find wild giant tortoises?

37. What is made by the Haber process?

38. What starts life in the Oort cloud?

39. To an astronomer, what are the Greeks and the Trojans?

40. What distinguishes a Gram-positive bacterium from a Gram-negative one?

41. Marie Curie discovered radium and which other chemical element?

42. What can be Batesian, Mullerian or Vavilovian?

43. What is a tektite?

44. What is a syncytium?

45. What is “trans” in a trans fat?

46. What does the Drake equation attempt to describe?

47. The Monument to the Great Fire of London was also intended to be a scientific instrument. What sort?

48. What is a Calvin cycle?

49. Which year is defined as “the present” for the purpose of calculating ages as “years before present”, or “BP”?

50. Who is supposed to have said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”?