Q 01/05

A speck of einsteinium flew aboard NASA's Surveyor 5 probe to help analyse the surface of which world?

A) Mars

B) Venus

C) The Moon

D) An asteroid

Answer · why

C) The Moon

The Moon met einsteinium less than two years before Apollo 11 landed nearby. The heavy isotope calibrated Surveyor 5's soil analyser because its signa...

Q 02/05

Why did the 1952 discovery of einsteinium in hydrogen bomb fallout go unannounced for about three years?

A) It was a military secret

B) The samples were lost

C) Rivals disputed the claim

D) Nobody could agree a name

Answer · why

A) It was a military secret

It was a military secret: the United States kept the find quiet during the Cold War arms race and declassified it in 1955. By then the team had remade...

Q 03/05

Einsteinium honours a physicist whose 1921 Nobel Prize rewarded which discovery, rather than relativity?

A) Brownian motion

B) The photoelectric effect

C) Bose–Einstein condensates

D) Stimulated emission

Answer · why

B) The photoelectric effect

The photoelectric effect won Albert Einstein the prize. He explained it in 1905, the same miracle year in which he published his special theory of rel...

Q 04/05

Einsteinium is too scarce and short-lived to sell, so what are today's tiny batches of element 99 made for?

A) Smoke detectors

B) Luminous watch dials

C) Spacecraft batteries

D) Scientific research

Answer · why

D) Scientific research

Scientific research is the only customer: chemists study the metal or use it as a target for making heavier elements. Americium, four places lighter, ...

Q 05/05

Einsteinium-253 releases about 1,000 watts of heat per gram, making a pure sample do what in the dark?

A) Glow by itself

B) Catch fire

C) Freeze solid

D) Turn pitch black

Answer · why

A) Glow by itself

Einsteinium can glow by itself, lit by the energy of its own decay. The same radiation wrecks the metal's crystal structure, which makes its basic pro...