60 Fun Facts About Hard Science

Which element was seen in the Sun's spectrum in 1868, decades before being found on Earth?

The bright yellow line at 587.49 nm was first taken for sodium; Norman Lockyer named the element for the Greek sun god.

In 2007, dehydrated tardigrades survived ten days exposed to what on the FOTON-M3 mission?

Some even survived the full range of solar ultraviolet, and back on Earth they rehydrated, moved and laid viable eggs.

Which two different sciences did the same woman win Nobel Prizes in, a feat no one else has matched?

She shared the 1903 physics prize with Pierre and Becquerel, and took the 1911 chemistry prize alone; the family went on to collect five Nobels.

Which pioneering scientist named the first element she discovered after her homeland, Poland?

Polonium honoured Poland; radium followed. Perey, a Curie student, later named francium for France.

Which is the densest stable element, about twice as dense as lead?

It edges out iridium so narrowly (22.587 vs 22.562 g/cm3) that only 1990s X-ray crystallography settled the contest.

Which metal has the highest melting point of any element, at 3,422 °C?

Carbon holds solid to higher temperatures but sublimes rather than melts at atmospheric pressure, so it has no melting point to compete.

Which element, discovered by Marguerite Perey in 1939, was the last found in nature?

Its most stable isotope has a half-life of only 22 minutes; it had been predicted as 'eka-caesium'.

Which element became, in 1937, the first to be produced predominantly artificially, hence its name?

Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè found it in cyclotron parts from Berkeley; Mendeleev had predicted it as ekamanganese.

Gallium's melting point of about 29.8 °C means it will do what?

It is one of only four metals liquid at or near room temperature and, unlike mercury, is non-toxic enough for high-temperature thermometers.

Bismuth-209, long thought stable, was found in 2003 to decay with a half-life of how long?

Researchers at Orsay detected the alpha decay; the activity works out to about 3 becquerels per tonne.

Several 19th-century chemists were maimed or killed trying to isolate which reactive element?

Henri Moissan finally isolated it in 1886 and got the 1906 chemistry Nobel two months before his death.

Since the 2019 SI redefinition, the kilogram is defined by fixing the exact value of what?

It replaced the platinum-iridium cylinder kept near Paris; the new definition took effect on 20 May 2019.

Since 1983, the metre has been defined in terms of what?

Light's speed in vacuum is fixed at exactly 299,792,458 m/s, so the metre is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes while cooling which element?

Its resistance vanished at 4.2 K, using the liquid helium he had recently been first to produce.

The complete expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor's interior is called what?

Meissner and Ochsenfeld found it in 1933; it is why a magnet levitates over a cooled superconductor.

Absolute zero corresponds to what temperature on the Celsius scale?

The third law of thermodynamics implies no physical process can reach it in a finite number of steps.

Who proposed the neutrino in 1930 to save a bedrock principle that beta decay seemed to violate?

Fermi supplied the name 'little neutral one'; the particle was not detected until Cowan and Reines in 1956, work rewarded with a Nobel in 1995.

Who first detected the positron, the electron's antiparticle, in 1932?

Dirac's equation had predicted it; Anderson found it in cosmic-ray tracks and named it from 'positive electron'.

The particle consistent with the Higgs boson was announced in 2012 by which two experiments?

The 40-year search ended at CERN's Large Hadron Collider; Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel.

Which Nobel laureate's 1993 book gave the Higgs boson its unloved nickname, the 'God particle'?

Peter Higgs himself objected to the name.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered what in 1964 with a horn antenna in New Jersey?

The relic radiation now corresponds to a black body at about 2.7 K; they initially blamed the noise on pigeon droppings.

Which planet was the only one located by mathematical prediction before it was seen through a telescope?

Johann Galle found it on 23 September 1846 within a degree of Le Verrier's predicted position, based on wobbles in Uranus's orbit.

Which planet rotates clockwise on its axis, opposite to its direction of orbit around the Sun?

Its slow retrograde spin is thought to result from solar tides fighting the differential heating of its crushing atmosphere; it also has no moons.

Who proposed in 1950 the distant cloud of icy bodies now thought to be the source of long-period comets?

It is theorised to extend from 2,000 to 200,000 AU, up to 3.2 light-years from the Sun; Öpik had floated a similar idea earlier.

On 25 August 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to do what?

Launched in 1977, it crossed the heliopause 35 years later and is the most distant human-made object.

Who discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory?

He was 23 and newly hired; Pluto's largest moon Charon is over half its diameter, so the pair are sometimes called a binary.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 thesis correctly concluded that stars are made mostly of what?

Henry Norris Russell rejected the finding at first because it contradicted the belief that Sun and Earth had similar compositions.

Which physicist worked out fission with her nephew Otto Frisch in 1938 but was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel?

Element 109, meitnerium, is named for her; she was the first woman to be a full professor of physics in Germany.

Chicago Pile-1, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, went critical on what date?

The team built it under the stands of a University of Chicago football field.

Which physicist received the 1945 Nobel Prize for the exclusion principle, after nomination by Einstein?

Colleagues joked about the 'Pauli effect', his supposed knack for breaking lab equipment simply by being nearby.

Which student in Franklin's lab took Photo 51, the X-ray key to the DNA double helix?

Franklin died in 1958 at 37; Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel.

Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for discovering what in maize?

Her 'jumping genes' work of the 1940s and 50s was met with such scepticism that she stopped publishing on it for years.

Which infectious agent, named from 'proteinaceous infectious particle', contains no DNA or RNA?

Prusiner insisted it be pronounced 'pree-on'; misfolded prion proteins cause scrapie, BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath won the 2009 Chemistry Nobel for the structure of what cellular machine?

George Palade had first observed ribosomes in 1955 and shared a 1974 Nobel for the discovery.

CRISPR sequences evolved in bacteria as what?

Bacteria store fragments of phage DNA to recognise repeat invaders; Cas9 turned the system into a gene-editing tool.

HeLa, the first immortalised human cell line, came from a 1951 tumour biopsy of which woman?

Cultured by George Gey at Johns Hopkins without her consent, the cells are still used worldwide; her family learned of them only in 1975.

Tu Youyou won the 2015 Nobel Prize for discovering which antimalarial drug from sweet wormwood?

She was the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel in any category.

Ignaz Semmelweis cut maternal deaths in 1840s Vienna by insisting doctors do what?

He could not explain why it worked, and colleagues offended by the implication rejected him; he died in an asylum in 1865.

Who developed radiocarbon dating at the University of Chicago, earning the 1960 chemistry Nobel?

Carbon-14's half-life of about 5,730 years limits reliable dates to roughly 50,000 years.

Buckminsterfullerene, discovered in 1985, is a cage of how many carbon atoms?

Its twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons resemble a football; it dissolves in hydrocarbons to give a purple solution.

Geim and Novoselov first isolated graphene at Manchester in 2004 using what everyday tool?

Their 'Scotch tape technique' peeled single-atom layers off graphite and won the 2010 physics Nobel.

Horseshoe crabs are not crabs at all; they are more closely related to which group?

They are chelicerates; their copper-based blue blood is harvested for a reagent that detects bacterial toxins.

Axolotls are studied intensively because of their unusual ability to regenerate what?

They keep larval features like external gills into adulthood and are nearly extinct in their native Xochimilco canals.

The Chicxulub crater, buried under the Yucatán, was made by an asteroid of roughly what diameter?

The crater itself is about 200 km across; the Alvarezes' iridium-layer theory came before the crater was even recognised.

The 1908 Tunguska explosion over Siberia is attributed to what?

It flattened about 2,150 square kilometres of forest and remains the largest impact event in recorded history, yet left no crater.

Which Scottish physician is credited with discovering nitrogen in 1772, calling it 'noxious air'?

Lavoisier proposed calling it 'azote', lifeless, a name French still uses.

Emmy Noether's first theorem links every continuous symmetry of a physical system to what?

Einstein, Weyl and Wiener all called her the most important woman in mathematics; her Göttingen students were 'the Noether boys'.

Euler's identity, e^(iπ) + 1 = 0, links how many fundamental mathematical constants?

It uses addition, multiplication and exponentiation exactly once each and is a special case of Euler's formula at x = π.

Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for which flight, the first American in space, in May 1961?

She later checked the computer's numbers for Glenn's orbit and plotted Apollo lunar rendezvous paths; Taraji P. Henson played her in Hidden Figures.

Roughly how many mathematical results did Srinivasa Ramanujan compile in his short life?

He died in 1920 aged 32; his 'lost notebook' kept mathematicians busy for decades.

The reference human genome contains approximately how many base pairs?

The Y chromosome was not completely sequenced until January 2022; a full female genome was reported in 2021.

Which physicist built the first artificial nuclear reactor and has a famous paradox about aliens named after him?

He left Italy in 1938 to protect his Jewish wife from racial laws, collecting his Nobel in Stockholm on the way.

In which year did Alfred Wegener first suggest that the continents slowly drift around the Earth?

Mainstream geology rejected the idea until the 1950s, and Wegener was better known in his lifetime for meteorology and polar research.

How long did the Wegener brothers stay aloft in April 1906 to set a record for continuous balloon flight?

Alfred and his brother Kurt pioneered the use of weather balloons to track air masses at the Lindenberg observatory.

Mendeleev's predicted elements ekaboron, ekaaluminium and ekasilicon turned out to be which trio?

The prefixes eka, dvi and tri come from Sanskrit for one, two and three.

Which policeman with a severe face infection was the first person treated with Oxford penicillin in 1941?

He improved until supplies ran out and he died; the following year US-made penicillin saved Anne Miller in the first American treatment.

In 1943 the best mould strain for mass-producing penicillin was found on what in a Peoria, Illinois market?

It yielded six times as much penicillin as Fleming's strain, helping the US make 2.3 million doses in time for D-Day.

Who coined the term mitochondrion, meaning 'a thread-like granule', in 1898?

The organelles had been discovered in insect muscle in 1857; the 'powerhouse of the cell' nickname came from a 1957 Scientific American article.

Ole Rømer first showed light has a finite speed in 1676 while studying which moon of Jupiter?

He estimated light takes about 11 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun; the true figure is closer to eight.

In which Ohio city did Michelson and Morley perform their famous 1887 aether experiment?

It was carried out at what is now Case Western Reserve University between April and July and published that November.