50 Fun Facts About 12th Grade

Which physician inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox from a milkmaid's blisters to prevent smallpox?

Edward Jenner took the cowpox from milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, who caught it from a cow called Blossom, whose hide now hangs in a London medical school library.

Which novel, begun by an 18-year-old during the 'Year Without a Summer' of 1816, is subtitled The Modern Prometheus?

Frankenstein came out of Lord Byron's challenge to his guests at Villa Diodati to write a ghost story; the same dare led his doctor, John Polidori, to The Vampyre, often seen as the start of the romantic vampire genre.

Whose skull does Hamlet hold in the graveyard, the court jester who once carried the young prince on his back?

Yorick's skull has been a real one: pianist André Tchaikowsky left his to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and David Tennant held it as Hamlet in 2008.

Which 1948 US programme sent $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe, an offer the Soviet Union refused?

The Marshall Plan took its name from Secretary of State George Marshall, who floated the idea in a speech at Harvard in June 1947; officially it was the European Recovery Program.

Which particle, identified by Chadwick at Cambridge in 1932, opened the way to nuclear fission six years later?

The neutron's discovery earned Chadwick the 1935 Nobel Prize, and he went on to head the British team on the Manhattan Project.

Which radiation, found in 1801 when Johann Ritter saw invisible rays darken silver chloride, causes sunburn?

Ultraviolet turned up because Ritter, hearing that Herschel had found heat rays beyond red, went looking past the other end of the spectrum. Ozone absorbs most of the sunburn-causing UV-B before it reaches us.

Which metal, melting at 3,422 °C, higher than any other metal, is drawn into the filaments of incandescent bulbs?

Tungsten's symbol W comes from its German name Wolfram, after the ore wolframite; it also has the highest tensile strength of any pure metal.

Which Orwell novel gave English 'Big Brother', 'doublethink' and Room 101, where each prisoner meets his worst fear?

Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell's ninth and final completed book, finished on the remote Scottish island of Jura while he was gravely ill with tuberculosis; it also gave English 'thoughtcrime' and 'Newspeak'.

Which ocean is widening about 2.5 centimetres a year along a central ridge that Marie Tharp mapped in the 1950s?

The Atlantic's ridge surfaces in Iceland. When Tharp spotted a rift valley running along its crest, she recalled, her colleague Bruce Heezen at first dismissed it as 'girl talk'; her maps went on to back seafloor spreading.

In sickle-cell anaemia, which amino acid replaces glutamate at position 6 of haemoglobin's beta-globin chain?

Valine's swap makes haemoglobin S clump into fibres when oxygen runs low, yet carriers of one copy are partly protected against malaria, a link proven in 1954.

Which physicist's 1913 atomic model, with electrons in fixed orbits, explained hydrogen's spectral lines?

Niels Bohr's model built on Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus and won him the 1922 Nobel Prize, yet within a few years Heisenberg's quantum mechanics had moved past its tidy orbits.

Which Austen novel, drafted as 'First Impressions', opens by declaring a rich single man 'must be in want of a wife'?

Pride and Prejudice could have appeared sixteen years sooner: in 1797 Austen's father offered the draft to a London publisher, who turned it down by return of post without seeing a page.

Which plastic, the first made from synthetic components, was created in the 1900s from phenol and formaldehyde?

Bakelite's inventor, Leo Baekeland, was already rich from Velox photographic paper and was hunting for a substitute for shellac, a resin secreted by insects.

Which rule, p² + 2pq + q², keeps allele frequencies constant in a population without selection, drift or migration?

Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium was called Hardy's law in English until 1943, when Curt Stern pointed out that the German physician Wilhelm Weinberg had got there first in 1908.

Which Mao campaign of backyard steel furnaces and forced communes caused a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese?

The Great Leap Forward pulled tens of millions of peasants out of the fields to smelt metal in clay furnaces, which turned out mostly brittle lumps unfit even for simple tools while the crops went untended.

Which boundary was redrawn in the 1990s to swing far east around Kiribati, putting the whole country on one side?

The International Date Line has no standing in international law, so any country can choose its own date; Kiribati's eastern islands dropped 31 December 1994 from the calendar to match the capital.

Which vector operation, whose result is perpendicular to both inputs, turns a lever arm and a force into torque?

The cross product of lever arm and force is the torque, which is why a longer spanner shifts a stubborn bolt more easily; the right-hand rule tells you which way the result points.

Which nutrient, found by Henrik Dam while feeding chickens a cholesterol-depleted diet, is needed for blood to clot?

Vitamin K got its letter because Dam's discovery was reported in a German journal, where it was christened Koagulationsvitamin.

Which 1958 experiment, growing E. coli on heavy nitrogen-15, showed that DNA replication is semiconservative?

Meselson–Stahl has been called 'the most beautiful experiment in biology', and it used the heavier but non-radioactive isotope so the DNA could be sorted by density in a centrifuge.

Whose 1928 mouse experiment with heat-killed smooth and live rough pneumococci revealed a 'transforming principle'?

Frederick Griffith's 'transforming principle' turned out to be DNA itself, as Avery, MacLeod and McCarty and then Hershey and Chase went on to show.

Which E. coli gene cluster, decoded by Jacob and Monod, switches on to digest milk sugar only when glucose runs short?

The lac operon showed Jacob and Monod how a cell switches its genes on and off; the same pair coined the term 'messenger RNA', and a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize followed.

What term covers solution properties like freezing-point depression that depend only on the number of solute particles?

Colligative comes from the Latin for 'bound together', and it is why road salt works: water's freezing point drops with the number of dissolved particles, whatever they are made of.

For a first-order chemical reaction, the half-life stays the same regardless of which quantity?

Initial concentration drops out: a first-order half-life depends solely on the rate constant k, which is why carbon-14 dating works on any sample size.

Which French physicist's 1924 thesis proposed that electrons have wavelengths, confirmed by diffraction in 1927?

Louis de Broglie first took a degree in history, meaning to become a diplomat, before his liking for science won out; the thesis that gave matter a wavelength earned him the 1929 Nobel Prize.

Which Presbyterian minister's probability theorem was read to the Royal Society in 1763, two years after his death?

Thomas Bayes never published it: his friend Richard Price found the essay among the dead man's papers, edited it and sent it to the Royal Society himself.

Which Shakespeare tragedy turns on a strawberry-spotted handkerchief that the ensign Iago plants in Cassio's lodgings?

Othello's plot was lifted from a 1565 Italian novella by Cinthio in which only Desdemona has a name; the rest are just 'the Moor' and 'the Ensign'.

Which British lawyer got just five weeks in 1947 to draw the border between India and Pakistan?

Cyril Radcliffe's line cut both Punjab and Bengal in two, yet it was announced only two days after independence, when the two new countries already existed.

Which metal, once dearer than gold, is now made by electrolysing its oxide dissolved in molten cryolite?

Aluminium was shown off as a precious metal at the 1855 Paris exhibition; in 1886 two 22-year-olds, Charles Hall in America and Paul Héroult in France, separately found the process that made it cheap.

Which soil bacterium's cry1Ac gene, coding for a crystal toxin, is spliced into cotton to kill bollworm larvae?

Bacillus thuringiensis toxin switches on only in the strongly alkaline gut of an insect larva and stays inert in our acidic one; sprays of the same bacterium are allowed in organic farming.

Which enzyme, found by Temin and Baltimore in 1970, lets HIV copy its RNA genome into DNA inside a host cell?

Reverse transcriptase vindicated Temin, whose idea that RNA could be copied back into DNA had been treated as heresy; our own cells use a relative of it, telomerase, to rebuild the tips of chromosomes.

Which 1987 treaty, since ratified by every UN member state, phased out the CFCs destroying the ozone layer?

The Montreal Protocol was signed just two years after scientists first reported the ozone hole over Antarctica; ozone levels stopped falling in the 1990s and have since begun to recover.

Which hormone, secreted by the trophoblast cells around an embryo, is the one a home pregnancy test strip detects?

hCG is the signal that tells a mother's body it is pregnant: it stops the next period and keeps progesterone flowing to maintain the lining of the womb.

In most flowering plants, what ploidy is the endosperm, the tissue that feeds the embryo inside a seed?

Triploid endosperm forms when a second sperm fuses with two polar nuclei, so it carries two copies of the mother's genome to one of the father's; Sergei Nawaschin first saw this 'triple fusion' in Kyiv in 1898.

Which 1952 Chicago experiment zapped methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water with electric sparks and produced amino acids?

Miller–Urey made even more amino acids than reported: sealed vials re-examined after Stanley Miller's death in 2007 turned up extra ones.

Which Swedish chemist's 1889 equation ties reaction rates to temperature through an activation energy barrier?

Svante Arrhenius became the first Swedish Nobel laureate in 1903, and back in 1896 he had also worked out how far rising carbon dioxide in the air would warm the Earth.

Which law ties the electric flux through a closed surface to the charge inside it?

Gauss's law is why a car body shields its passengers from lightning: with all the charge on the outside of a conductor, the field inside a closed metal shell is zero.

Which element's nuclei sit near the top of the binding-energy curve, so both fusion and fission release energy by moving toward it?

Iron-56 is the most efficiently bound nucleus, with the least mass per nucleon, which is why stars cannot keep burning once their cores turn to iron and instead collapse.

Which element, with five valence electrons, is the usual dopant added to silicon to make an n-type semiconductor?

Phosphorus donates its fifth electron to the silicon lattice, while boron, with only three, does the opposite and creates the 'holes' of a p-type semiconductor.

Which Scottish physicist's 1865 paper showed electric and magnetic fields travel as waves at the speed of light?

James Clerk Maxwell also proved on paper that Saturn's rings must be swarms of small particles, a prediction the Voyager probes confirmed more than a century later.

What is a square matrix called when its determinant is zero?

Singular matrices cannot be undone: a zero determinant means the map squashes space flat, into fewer dimensions, so no inverse can restore what was lost.

Which function is left unchanged by differentiation, the slope at every point matching the function's value there?

eˣ is also its own integral, up to a constant, which is why it models anything whose growth rate is proportional to its size, from compound interest to bacteria.

Which distribution counts the successes in n independent yes-or-no trials and reduces to a Bernoulli trial when n is 1?

Binomial probabilities come straight from Pascal's triangle: the number of ways to place k successes among n trials is the coefficient 'n choose k'.

Which Romantic poet wrote the sonnet 'Ozymandias' in a friendly contest with his friend Horace Smith?

Percy Bysshe Shelley's rival gave his own sonnet the same title, then renamed it 'On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below'.

Which 1868 event returned the teenage emperor Mutsuhito to power in Japan and launched its rapid westernisation?

The Meiji Restoration moved the emperor from Kyoto to the shogun's city of Edo, which was renamed Tokyo, while real power passed to a small group of nobles and former samurai.

Which future president drafted the Bill of Rights and steered it through the First Congress in 1789?

James Madison had opposed a bill of rights as mere 'parchment barriers', but he promised voters one to win his House seat against James Monroe, then wrote the amendments himself.

Which measure, first developed by Simon Kuznets for a 1930s report to the US Congress, totals a country's yearly output?

Gross domestic product came with a health warning from its own inventor, who told Congress in that report that 'the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred' from such a figure.

Which jurist chaired the drafting committee of India's Constitution and is called its principal architect?

B. R. Ambedkar held doctorates from Columbia and the LSE, and in 1956 led mass conversions of Dalits to Buddhism weeks before he died.

Which Pacific warming pattern was named by Peruvian fishermen because it arrived around Christmas?

El Niño, Spanish for the Christ child, began as the fishermen's name for a local warm current; scientists later borrowed it for the ocean-wide pattern that disrupts weather around the world.

Which short DNA pieces does ligase join together to build the lagging strand during replication?

Okazaki fragments are named for husband-and-wife Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki, who showed in the 1960s that one strand is copied in short backward bursts.

Which test sorts primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols by how fast they turn cloudy in zinc chloride and HCl?

The Lucas test works because tertiary carbocations form most easily: a tertiary alcohol clouds the tube at once, a secondary one takes about five minutes, and a primary one usually stays clear.