Ever since Archimedes had his famous bath scientists have been known to make discoveries and test their theories in a most unusual manner. Friedrich Kekule must have tucked into a bad mushroom at dinner because he had a bizarre dream of a serpent eating its own tail. It all turned out well because he figured out it was the chemical structure of the benzene ring — the basis of organic chemistry. For Dmitri Mendelyeev, the shape of the Periodic Table of Elements came to him in a dream, this time of a game of Solitaire. Take a look at the arrangement of cards in Solitaire and you will see a marked resemblance to the Periodic Table. Alexander Fleming was just careless when he left a culture plate of bacteria open to the air. That moment of carelessness led to the discovery of penicillin and the era of antibiotics.
The 17th century philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon had his moment of inspiration about the possibility of using snow to preserve meat while journeying in his coach one snowy winter. He jumped out, bought a chicken and stuffed the fowl with snow.
The result of his experiment as regards the frozen bird is unknown. What is known however is that Bacon contracted a fatal case of pneumonia. Barry Marshall tried something equally foolhardy. To dispel scepticism and prove that stomach infection with the Helicobacter pylori organism was directly associated with the development of gastritis and that the bacteria was not merely a bystander, Marshall drank a beaker of H. pylori culture! He became ill with nausea and vomiting several days later. An endoscopic examination 10 days later showed signs of gastritis and the presence of the bacteria that proved his theory. Luckily Marshall survived his experiment and went on to win the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for this work!
It’s been around 2,000 years since a naked Archimedes took to the streets crying out in Greek, “I have found it”. It’s your turn now to have your “Eureka moment” as you discover the answers to the 13 questions on the topic of science and technology.
1. What was unusual about the centigrade scale created by Anders Celsius that was modified to its present well-known form by Carolus Linnaeus?
2. To this day smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated from nature. The credit for this goes to the discovery of the vaccine for small pox by Edward Jenner in 1796. What was the origin of the term vaccine?
3. Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation producing the characteristic nuclear “blue glow” and is named after Soviet Nobel laureate Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov who was the first to rigorously characterise it. Jawaharlal Nehru was so captivated by the appearance of this radiation at BARC that he compared it to what mythological beings?
4, How do you determine which colour goes to which side when solving the puzzle of the Rubik’s Cube?
5. Element 43, predicted by Mendelyeev who named it eka-manganese, was the first element to be artificially manufactured and was therefore named after the Latin/Greek meaning “artificial”. It is commonly used in the medical field for radiodiagnosis. What is it?
6. What unusual design has been used for conveyor belts that last longer because the entire surface area of the belt gets the same amount of wear, for continuous-loop recording tapes (to double the playing time) and are common in the manufacture of fabric computer printer and typewriter ribbons, as they allow the ribbon to be twice as wide as the printhead whilst using both half-edges evenly?
7. This company is engaged in an ongoing campaign to convince the public that its name should not be used as a verb. It therefore issued ads declaring that “you cannot “___X____” a document, but you can copy it on “a ___P_____…” Fill in the blanks.
8. What new method of designing cars such as the Dusenberg allowed the now commonplace smooth elegant curves as contrasted to the “boxy” designs of earlier motor cars?
9. What word meaning to demote or devalue was chosen by the American Dialect Society as the Word of the Year for 2006?
10. Rene Descartes who dedicated much time to the study of this gland, called it the “seat of the soul”. It is occasionally associated with the sixth chakra (also called Ajna or the third eye chakra) in yoga. In fact in lower vertebrate animals the cells of this gland have a strong resemblance to the photoreceptor cells of the eye. The hormone melatonin secreted by this gland is believed to play a role in maintaining circadian rhythm. Name the gland.
11. What technology invented by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1948 was first implemented through the work of Raymond Alexander and Frank Stietz, as a system to identify railroad cars?
12. When an element is heated to a very high temperature, the electrons in its atom get enough energy to break free from the atom. This process is known as Thermal ionisation. The formula for this is considered by Scientific American to be the foundation for field stellar astrophysics. Who was the scientist who proposed this formula and also interestingly prepared the original plan for the Damodar Valley Project?
13. In 1998, improving upon the slogan of then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave the nation a new one, ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan aur _________’, to the nation. Fill in the blank.
navinjay@yahoo.com