50 Fun Facts About 12th Grade

Which physician inoculated his gardener's eight-year-old son 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 ghost-story contest at Villa Diodati, the same wet week that produced The Vampyre, a precursor of Dracula.

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 17 European countries, an offer the Soviet Union refused?

The Marshall Plan was officially the European Recovery Program, and its $13.3 billion works out at about $137 billion in today's money.

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 when Johann Ritter saw it darken silver chloride faster than violet light, causes sunburn?

Ultraviolet shorter than about 300 nm never reaches the ground, absorbed by ozone and oxygen, which is why the ozone layer matters for skin cancer rates.

Which metal, melting at 3,422 °C, higher than any other element, 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, and it also gave English 'thoughtcrime' and 'Newspeak'; its '2 + 2 = 5' was lifted from a Soviet five-year-plan slogan.

Which ocean is widening about 2.5 centimetres a year along a central ridge that breaks the surface in Iceland?

The Atlantic's mid-ocean ridge is part of the longest mountain range in the world, and mapping it in the 1950s clinched the case for 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 Danish physicist's 1913 atomic model, with electrons in fixed orbits, explained hydrogen's spectral lines?

Niels Bohr's model built on Rutherford's nucleus and killed off the plum-pudding atom, yet full quantum mechanics made it obsolete by the mid-1920s.

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

Pride and Prejudice was written when Austen was 20 or 21, yet it waited until 1813 to appear, her third novel written and her second to be published.

Which plastic, the first made from synthetic components, did Leo Baekeland patent in 1909 from phenol and formaldehyde?

Bakelite's inventor was already rich from Velox photographic paper and was hunting for a substitute for shellac, the secretion of the lac insect.

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 up to 55 million Chinese?

The Great Leap Forward's August 1958 decision to double steel output within a year pulled millions of peasants off the land, and the harvest collapsed.

Which boundary, roughly along 180° longitude, swings far east so that all of Kiribati shares a single calendar day?

The International Date Line's Kiribati kink puts the country's Line Islands on UTC+14, the most advanced clocks on Earth, and 31 December 1994 was skipped there entirely.

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

The cross product's magnitude equals the area of the parallelogram the two vectors span, and the right-hand rule decides which way it 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 won Jacob and Monod the 1965 Nobel Prize; they used it to work out how a cell decides which enzyme to make.

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', a word Wilhelm Ostwald introduced in 1891, and it is why salt melts ice on roads whatever the salt.

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 won the 1929 Nobel Prize after Davisson and Germer saw electrons diffract off a nickel crystal in 1927, and he later inherited the family dukedom.

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 edited the manuscript and it was read aloud on 23 December 1763.

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, never before east of Paris, got five weeks in 1947 to draw the India–Pakistan border?

Cyril Radcliffe refused his 40,000-rupee fee after seeing the bloodshed his line set off, and his map split Punjab and Bengal almost in half.

Which metal, pricier than gold in the early 1800s, is now made by electrolysing its oxide dissolved in molten cryolite?

Aluminium was still dearer than silver when chosen to cap the Washington Monument in 1884; two years later two 22-year-olds, Hall and Héroult, 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 strains make over 200 different Bt toxins, and by 2014 more than seven million Indian farmers were growing the modified cotton.

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

Reverse transcriptase earned Temin and Baltimore a share of the 1975 Nobel Prize, and the same enzyme lets our own cells extend the telomeres on their chromosomes.

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

The Montreal Protocol has removed 98% of ozone-depleting substances, and Kofi Annan called it perhaps the single most successful treaty to date.

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

hCG keeps the corpus luteum alive through the first trimester, and the most sensitive tests pick it up 6 to 12 days after ovulation.

In flowering plants, what ploidy is the endosperm, formed when a second sperm fuses with two polar nuclei?

Triploid endosperm carries two copies of the mother's genome to one of the father's, a 'triple fusion' first seen by Sergei Nawaschin in Kyiv over a century ago.

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 was also the first to calculate how rising carbon dioxide would warm the Earth.

Which law, first stated by Lagrange in 1773, ties the electric flux through a closed surface to the charge inside?

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 top 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 produced the first durable colour photograph in 1861 and worked out that Saturn's rings must be swarms of small particles.

What is a square matrix called when its determinant is zero, so it collapses volume and has no inverse?

Singular matrices are also called degenerate: a zero determinant means the map squashes space into fewer dimensions, so there is no way to undo it.

Which function, taking the value 1 at zero, is the only differentiable function that equals its own derivative?

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 Christmas 1817 contest with a banker friend?

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote it as the Younger Memnon, a head-and-torso fragment of a Ramesses II statue, was on its way to Britain; Ozymandias is the pharaoh's Greek name.

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

The Meiji Restoration was known at the time as the 'Honorable Restoration', and Mutsuhito had inherited the throne only a year earlier when Emperor Kōmei died.

How many amendments make up the US Bill of Rights, ratified in December 1791 largely through Madison's efforts?

Ten of the twelve articles Congress sent the states in 1789 were ratified; one of the leftovers finally became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992.

Which measure, first developed by Simon Kuznets for a 1934 report to the US Congress, totals a country's yearly output?

Gross domestic product's own inventor warned Congress in that report against using it as a measure of welfare, advice mostly ignored ever since.

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 after the Christ child because it peaked around Christmas?

El Niño's name reached science in 1892, when Captain Camilo Carrillo told a Lima congress that sailors used it for the warm south-flowing current.

Which short DNA pieces, 100 to 200 nucleotides long in eukaryotes, does ligase join to build the lagging strand?

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 1930 method sorts primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols by how fast they turn cloudy in zinc chloride and HCl?

The Lucas test, named for Howard Lucas, works because tertiary carbocations form fastest, so tertiary alcohols cloud the tube almost immediately.