60 Fun Facts About Hard Science

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

Helium's bright yellow D3 line at 587.49 nm, seen in the 1868 eclipse spectrum, was at first taken for sodium; Norman Lockyer named the element after Helios, the Greek sun god, and it was isolated on Earth in 1895.

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

On the 2007 FOTON-M3 flight (the TARDIS experiment), dried tardigrades spent ten days in the vacuum of space in low Earth orbit; most survived vacuum alone, and some survived vacuum plus solar ultraviolet, later laying 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?

Osmium is the densest stable element at about 22.59 g/cm3, edging out iridium (22.56); lead is only 11.3 g/cm3, so osmium is roughly twice as dense.

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

Tungsten melts at 3,422 °C, the highest of any metal; carbon stays solid to higher temperatures but sublimes at atmospheric pressure rather than melting, so tungsten holds the record among elements with a true melting point.

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

Francium, found by Marguerite Perey in Paris in 1939, was the last element discovered in nature rather than made artificially; its longest-lived isotope, francium-223, has a half-life of about 22 minutes.

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

Technetium, from the Greek for 'artificial', was identified in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè in molybdenum foil irradiated in Berkeley's cyclotron; Mendeleev had predicted it as eka-manganese.

Gallium is famous among metals for being able to do what?

Gallium melts at 29.76 °C, below body temperature of about 37 °C, so a solid lump will melt in a person's hand; it then stays liquid all the way up to about 2,400 °C.

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

Bismuth-209's alpha decay, detected at Orsay in 2003, gives a half-life of about 1.9 × 10^19 years, roughly a billion times the age of the universe; a tonne of bismuth produces only about 3 decays per second.

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?

The kilogram is now defined by fixing the Planck constant at exactly 6.62607015 × 10^-34 J·s, replacing the platinum-iridium cylinder kept at Sèvres near Paris; the 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?

Mercury's electrical resistance vanished abruptly at 4.2 K in Kamerlingh Onnes's Leiden laboratory on 8 April 1911, a discovery made possible by the cryogenic liquefier he had built three years earlier.

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?

Absolute zero is −273.15 °C, exactly 0 on the Kelvin scale, which is why Kelvin and Celsius readings differ by 273.15; the third law of thermodynamics says no finite process can reach it.

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?

ATLAS and CMS, the two general-purpose detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, each announced a new boson near 125 GeV on 4 July 2012; Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 physics Nobel.

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

Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 physics Nobel for the muon neutrino, wrote The God Particle with Dick Teresi in 1993; he said the publisher would not allow his preferred title, 'The Goddamn Particle'.

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

The cosmic microwave background, relic radiation from the early universe now matching a 2.7 K black body, turned up as noise in the Holmdel horn antenna in 1964; they first blamed pigeon droppings, and shared the 1978 physics Nobel.

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

Neptune was found by Johann Galle on 23 September 1846 within a degree of the position Urbain Le Verrier had calculated from irregularities in Uranus's orbit, the only planet discovered from prediction rather than by chance.

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

Venus spins clockwise as seen from above its north pole, taking 243 Earth days for one rotation, longer than its 225-day orbit; a full day-night cycle there lasts about 117 Earth days, and it has no moons.

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

Jan Oort proposed the cloud in 1950 from the orbits of long-period comets; the Oort cloud is thought to reach from about 2,000 to 200,000 AU, over three light-years out, and Ernst Öpik had floated a similar idea in 1932.

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

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, crossed the heliopause on 25 August 2012 to enter interstellar space, the first spacecraft to do so, about 121 astronomical units from the Sun.

Who discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory?

Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old hired at Lowell Observatory the year before, spotted Pluto on 18 February 1930 by blinking photographic plates; Pluto's 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?

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 Harvard thesis showed that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium; Henry Norris Russell persuaded her to call the result spurious, then reached the same conclusion himself in 1929.

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?

Chicago Pile-1 went critical on 2 December 1942 at about 3:25 pm in a squash court beneath the west stands of Stagg Field, the University of Chicago's football ground, built from graphite blocks and uranium.

Who shared the 1963 physics Nobel with Maria Goeppert Mayer for the nuclear shell model?

J. Hans D. Jensen, working in Heidelberg, arrived at the nuclear shell model with spin-orbit coupling independently of Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1949; the two shared half of the 1963 physics Nobel, the other half going to Eugene Wigner.

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

Raymond Gosling, Rosalind Franklin's PhD student at King's College London, took Photo 51 in May 1952; Franklin died in 1958 at 37, and Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel.

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

Barbara McClintock's transposons, or 'jumping genes', were mobile DNA elements she tracked through maize kernel colour patterns in the 1940s and 50s; scepticism was so strong she stopped publishing on them for years before the 1983 Nobel.

Which infectious agent, responsible for scrapie and BSE, 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?

CRISPR arrays are a bacterial defence against viruses: cells store fragments of phage DNA as spacers and use them to recognise and cut repeat invaders, the adaptive immune system that Cas9 gene editing later borrowed.

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

Henrietta Lacks's cervical tumour cells, taken at Johns Hopkins in 1951 and grown by George Gey without her knowledge, became HeLa, the first human cell line to keep dividing indefinitely; she died the same year aged 31.

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

Tu Youyou isolated artemisinin from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) in 1972, after a fourth-century Chinese text led her to extract it at low temperature rather than by boiling; she was the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel.

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

Ignaz Semmelweis ordered doctors at Vienna General Hospital in 1847 to wash their hands in chlorinated lime before examining mothers; childbed-fever deaths on his ward fell from around 10% to about 1%, yet colleagues rejected him.

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

Willard Libby developed radiocarbon dating at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s and won 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?

Buckminsterfullerene is C60: sixty carbon atoms at the vertices of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, the pattern of a football; it dissolves in toluene 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?

Horseshoe crabs are chelicerates, the group that includes spiders and scorpions, rather than crustaceans; their copper-based blue blood is harvested for Limulus amoebocyte lysate, a reagent that detects bacterial endotoxins.

Axolotls keep larval features such as external gills into adulthood, a trait called what?

Neoteny is the retention of juvenile traits in sexually mature adults; axolotls keep their feathery external gills and aquatic larval form for life, breeding without ever metamorphosing unless dosed with thyroid hormone.

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

The Chicxulub impactor was roughly 10 km across, leaving a crater about 180–200 km wide beneath the Yucatán; the Alvarezes' 1980 iridium-layer theory predated recognition of the crater in 1991.

The 1908 Tunguska explosion over Siberia is attributed to what?

Tunguska is best explained as the air burst of a stony asteroid tens of metres across exploding several kilometres up on 30 June 1908; it flattened about 2,150 square kilometres of forest but left no crater.

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

Daniel Rutherford, a Scottish physician and Joseph Black's student, isolated nitrogen in 1772 and called it 'noxious air'; Lavoisier later proposed 'azote', meaning lifeless, which became the French name.

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

Noether's theorem, published in 1918, shows that every continuous symmetry yields a conservation law: time-translation symmetry gives conservation of energy, spatial translation gives momentum, and rotation gives angular momentum.

Euler's identity is celebrated for linking how many fundamental mathematical constants in one equation?

Euler's identity links five fundamental constants: 0, 1, e, i and π, using addition, multiplication and exponentiation once each; it is Euler's formula e^(ix) = cos x + i sin x evaluated at x = π.

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

Katherine Johnson computed the suborbital trajectory for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight of 5 May 1961; she later hand-checked the computer's numbers for Glenn's 1962 orbit, and 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 reference human genome runs to about 3.1 billion base pairs; the 2022 telomere-to-telomere assembly filled the last gaps, adding nearly 200 million bases that the 2003 Human Genome Project sequence had missed.

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

Enrico Fermi led the team that built Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial reactor; the 'Fermi paradox' asks why no aliens have been seen. He left Italy in 1938 to protect his Jewish wife, collecting his Nobel in Stockholm en route.

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

Alfred Wegener presented continental drift in January 1912 lectures in Frankfurt and Marburg, publishing The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915; mainstream geology rejected the idea until plate tectonics emerged in the 1950s and 60s.

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

Alfred and Kurt Wegener stayed aloft for 52.5 hours in April 1906, a world record for continuous balloon flight, while working at the Lindenberg aeronautical observatory near Berlin, where they used balloons to track air masses.

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

Scandium, gallium and germanium, predicted in 1871 as eka-boron, eka-aluminium and eka-silicon, were found in 1879, 1875 and 1886 with properties matching Mendeleev's forecasts; eka is Sanskrit for one.

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

Albert Alexander, an Oxford policeman, was given penicillin by Howard Florey's team on 12 February 1941 and rallied until supplies ran out; he died in March. In 1942 US-made penicillin saved Anne Miller, the first American patient.

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

A mouldy cantaloupe brought in by lab assistant Mary Hunt at the Peoria agricultural research laboratory yielded Penicillium chrysogenum, a strain far more productive than Fleming's; its mutated descendants let the US make 2.3 million doses for D-Day.

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

Carl Benda coined 'mitochondria' in 1898 from Greek mitos, thread, and chondrion, granule; Kölliker had seen the organelles in insect muscle in 1857, and Siekevitz's 1957 Scientific American article dubbed them the powerhouse of the cell.

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

Rømer timed eclipses of Io, Jupiter's innermost large moon, and found them running late as Earth receded from Jupiter; he estimated light takes about 11 minutes to cross the Earth–Sun distance, against the true 8 minutes 19 seconds.

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

The Michelson–Morley experiment ran in Cleveland, at what is now Case Western Reserve University, between April and July 1887; its null result for the aether wind was published that November.