Q: How many hearts do octopuses have?

Octopuses have three hearts. Two of the hearts work exclusively to move blood beyond the animal’s gills, while the third keeps circulation flowing for the organs. 

Three

Four

Two

One

A: 1

Q: Octopuses have blue blood. Which element forms the basis of its blood that gives the blue colour?

To survive in the deep ocean, octopuses evolved a copper rather than iron-based blood called hemocyanin, which turns its blood blue. This copper base is more efficient at transporting oxygen than haemoglobin when the water temperature is very low and not much oxygen is around.

Iron

Chromium

Copper

Cobalt

A: 3

Q: Where are two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons located?

Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons reside in its arms. As a result, the arms can problem-solve how to open a shellfish while the brain is busy doing something else, like checking out a cave for more food.

Brain

Eyes

Gills

Arms/ tentacles

A: 4

Q: How many eggs on average can an octopus lay?

Female octopuses can lay up to 400,000 eggs, which they obsessively guard and tend to. Prioritizing their motherly duties, they stop eating till the eggs hatch.

10,000

50

40,000

800

A: 3

Q: Which octopus species is the most poisonous?

The blue-ringed octopus, despite its small size, carries enough venom to kill 26 adult humans within minutes.

Giant Pacific Octopus

Blue Ring Octopus

Caribbean Reef Octopus

Coconut Octopus

A: 2

Questions:

1. What is the name of the variety of invertebrate marine animals characterised by a hard, spiny covering or skin?

2. Name the part of the spine that is a fibrous cartilage bonding two adjacent vertebrae. In space, this part decompresses, allowing astronauts to grow a little taller – height that they lose once they’re back on the earth.

3. The cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a fluid produced in the brian’s ventricles, and which surrounds the organ and the spinal cord and acts as a shock-absorber to protect them. Name the condition resulting from an excess buildup of CSF in the ventricles.

4. Name the condition caused by a vestigial organ in the spine and attributed commonly to the “beach chair” position – i.e. sitting with a dorsally tilted pelvis in individuals with tetraplegia.

5. The largest vertebrates that ever walked the earth were the sauropod dinosaurs. Some of their vertebrae had hollow portions on their sides, called ___________, to reduce their weight without losing their strength. Fill in the blank.

Visual:

All mammals (save a few) have seven cervical vertebrae. Name the mammal shown above, which has the most number of cervical vertebrae (eight or nine).

Answers:

1. Echinoderms

2. Intervertebral disc

3. Hydrocephalus

4. Coccygeal pressure ulcers

5. Pleurocoels

Visual: Three-toed sloth

Questions:

1. Sound loudness is measured using its power. Specifically, _______ measures the relative difference between one power level and a reference level on a base-10 logarithmic scale. Fill in the blank.

2. The reference level in the question above relates to the threshold of human hearing. In general, this is the minimum level of sound that an organism can hear with no other source of noise nearby. What is the threshold for humans (in pascals)?

3. The human ear isn’t equally sensitive to all frequencies of sound. So scientists modify a measured sound power level by a factor derived from the _-_________ scale, first published in 1933. Fill in the blanks.

4. When an object produces a fluctuating amount of sound over time, the equivalent sound level (L_eq) denotes the amount of acoustic energy averaged over that time. What is L_eq called when sound data is collected at narrow intervals (fractions of a second)?

5. India’s Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 specify environmental noise limits by area and time of day. In residential areas, the maximum allowable noise between 6 am and 10 pm is X dB(A) L_eq. What is the value of X?

Answers:

1. Decibel

2. Neper

3. 20 micropascals

4. Short L_eq

5. 55 dB(A) L_eq

The 2023 physics Nobel Prize has been awarded for attosecond physics
| Photo Credit: AP

Questions:

1. Attosecond physics deals with light pulses that are emitted for a few attoseconds at a time, no more. By bouncing such pulses off of electrons, scientists practically have a camera that can ‘see’ electrons changing their properties. How much of a second is one attosecond?

2. Modern attosecond physics is partly rooted in innovations to build powerful lasers. One such innovation was recognised by the 2018 Nobel Prize for physics – awarded to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland. Of them, Dr. Mourou and Dr. Strickland were awarded for being the first to practically implement _______ _____ _____________. Fill in the blanks.

3. The Nobel Committee awarded a similar prize, for chemistry, in 1999 to the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail. Dr. Zewail’s contributions helped physicists and chemists study chemical reactions in extreme detail. As a result, he is called the “father of ______________”. Fill in the blank.

4. A fundamental concept used to produce attosecond pulses of light is ____-________ __________. Here, when a beam of light, like from a laser, illuminates a gas, atoms in the gas emit light whose frequency is some high multiple of the beam. Fill in the blanks.

5. In 2017, researchers in Zurich created a world record by producing the shortest pulse of light ever: its duration was just 43 attoseconds. Which gas did they use in their experiment?

Answers:

1. 10^-18 seconds

2. Chirped pulse amplification

3. Femtochemistry

4. High-harmonic generation

5. Argon

Q: When did chickens first get domesticated?

Domestication probably occurred 7,000-10,000 years ago in Southeast Asia and Oceana. Distribution of Chickens occurred rapidly and was widespread because of their ability to provide meat and eggs without being competitive for human food sources.

4,000 years ago

7,000-10,000 years ago

15,000-12,000 years ago

16,000 years ago

A: 2

Q: Where did the domestication of the dog likely first occur?

Scientists suggest that dogs were domesticated from a wolf population somewhere in Siberia or western Beringia during the late Pleistocene, and before crossing into the Americas.

Asia

North America

Australia

Oceania

A: 1

Q: The process of selective breeding has led to the creation of many specialized breeds of domesticated animals. What is the term for this controlled mating to produce specific traits?

Artificial selection is the identification by humans of desirable traits in plants and animals, and the steps taken to enhance and perpetuate those traits in future generations.

Genetic engineering

Hybridization

Inbreeding

Artificial selection

A: 4

Q: In what region did the cultivation of rice and the domestication of water buffalo play a significant role in ancient agriculture?

The current scientific consensus, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, is that rice was first domesticated in the Yangtze River basin in China.

South America

North America

Southeast Asia

Europe

A: 3

Q: This animal is called the “ship of the desert” due to its historical role in transportation and trade. Which animal is this?

Often called “ships of the desert”, camels have long been valued as pack or saddle animals. The Arabian camel was domesticated about around 3,000 years ago.

Camels

Donkeys

Horses

Cows

A: 1

Ian Wilmut, the cloning pioneer has died, the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh said Monday. He was 79.
| Photo Credit: AP

Q: Which organism was the first mammal to be successfully cloned?

Dolly was a female Finn-Dorset sheep and the first mammal that was cloned from an adult somatic cell.

Sheep

Cat

Dog

Mouse

A: 1

Q: Which process was used to clone Dolly the sheep?

Dolly was cloned using a process called Somatic cell nuclear transfer. The process involved transplanting nuclei from adult cells into oocytes or blastocysts and allowing them to grow and differentiate, producing pluripotent cells.

Somatic cell Mitochondrial transfer

Somatic cell Cytoplasmic transfer

Somatic cell nuclear transfer

Somatic cell ribosome transfer

A: 3

Q: When was the first cloned puppy ‘born’?

Snuppy ‘born’ on April 24, 2005, was an Afghan hound, the first dog clone. The puppy was created using a cell from an ear from an adult Afghan hound and involved 123 surrogate mothers.

April 24, 2015

March 6, 2020

May 15, 2001

April 24, 2005

A: 4

Q: What is a common source of donor cells in therapeutic cloning experiments?

Therapeutic cloning involves creating a cloned embryo for the sole purpose of producing embryonic stem cells with the same DNA as the donor cell. The richest source of embryonic stem cells is tissue formed during the first five days after a fertilised egg has started to divide. At this stage of development, the clump of cells are called the blastocyst.

 Blastocyst

Epithelial cells

Astrocytes

Osteocytes

A: 1

Q: Who coined the term ‘clone’?

In 1903, plant physiologist Herbert J. Webber coined the term “clone,” from the Greek klon, to refer to the technique of propagating new plants using cuttings, bulbs or buds.

Ernst Haeckel

Herbert J. Webber

Ian Wilmut

Sir Julian Huxley

A: 2

Q: A logic gate is a device that performs a logical operation on the inputs it receives. E.g., the value of 1 OR 0 is 1 and the value of 1 AND 0 is 0. Name the branch of algebra that deals with such combinations and their underlying theory.

A: Boolean algebra

Q: Very large scale integration, or VLSI, refers to the technology by which billions of metal-oxide semiconductor transistors are combined in a single chip. Name the two logic gates most commonly used in these setups.

A: XOR and AND

Q: Name the two logic gates that are deemed to be functionally complete – i.e. each capable of recreating the functions of any other logic gate (AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR) by being combined in different ways.

A: NOR and NAND

Q: The most common type of transistor in modern digital circuits is the MOS. ‘MOS’ stands for metal-oxide semiconductor. What does ‘FET’ stand for?

A: Field effect transistor

Q: A quantum computer also uses logic gates to execute different types of calculations. Its basic computational unit is the qubit. When a qubit is composed of two basis states, the ________ gate produces a quantum superposition of these states. Fill in the blank.

A: Hadamard gate

Q: This image shows three NOR gates mimicking the operation of which other gate?

A: AND gate