Take MailOnline’s science quiz and test what you REALLY know about life and the universe
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1. How long would it take to fall all the way through the Earth through an airless, frictionless hole?
Answer: 42 minutes
While building a tunnel through the center of the Earth would be a major engineering challenge, if you managed to fall through it, you would speed up while traveling.
The gravity would gradually decrease until you experienced a brief moment of zero gravity in the middle and you would slow down and come to a stop on the other side.
However, this only works if you assume there is no air resistance or friction in your tunnel, so it should be a full vacuum.
2. What is spaghettification?
Answer: What happens to someone who falls into a black hole?
This is the scientific term for what happens to someone who falls into a black hole.
A black hole is a star that has completely collapsed. If you fell into a black hole feet first, you would find that the gravity on your feet was greater than on your head because your feet are closer to the center of mass of the black hole.
What at first would have been an irritation became an excruciatingly painful and irresistible force, stretching your body longer and longer until you became a long, pink spaghetti-like structure.
3. What is Ethology?
Answer: The study of animal behavior
The name is derived from the combination of the Greek for character and -ology.
The field first began as a discipline in the 1950s when Konrad Lorenz began investigating the instinctive behavior of animals.
4. If it is 9pm on Christmas Eve in London, what time is it at the geographic North Pole?
Answer: 9 p.m
Time on Earth is arbitrary. In an effort to make 9 p.m. correspond to approximately the same point of the day, humans have divided the world into different time zones.
Each time zone divides the planet as an orange segment, accounting for 15 degrees of Earth’s longitude. While most have a clear cut of one hour, some have a time difference of 30 minutes or 45 minutes.
However, each time zone actually converges at the geographic north pole. As a result, it is in every time zone at once and depending on which direction you step, you will end up in a different time zone.
However, to make it practical, the polar region is set to GMT, the same time as London during winter.
5. Which answer is most likely to be correct on multiple-choice tests with four options?
Answer: The second
Humans find it difficult to generate random patterns. For questions with four options, there is a tendency to have more answers with the second option correct. With five answers, the last option scores slightly better, but with three there is no clear bias.
When the choice is between “true” and “false”, there are almost always more “true” answers.
6. What is the furthest you can see with the naked eye?
Answer: 2.5 million light years
The human eye is very sensitive and can detect only a handful of photons under the right conditions. It was widely believed that it was possible for humans to see a naked candle flame about 30 miles away, but researchers have recently shown that the actual distance is about 1.5 miles.
However, we can also distinguish light from stars and galaxies that are far away. On a dark night away from artificial light, it should be possible to make out the Andromeda galaxy – our closest neighboring galaxy, which is 2.5 million light-years away.
7. Why are the cells that make up your body called cells?
Answer: They look like the rooms where monks lived
In his 1665 book Micrographia, Robert Hook described what he saw when he examined thin pieces of cork through a recently developed piece of technology called a microscope. He said the structure of the cork consisted of an “infinite company of small boxes, which he said resembled the rows of cells in a monastery’s dormitory.” The name stuck and they are now used to describe the many types of living biological cells, from bacteria to the largest animals on Earth.
8. To within 300 metres, what is the highest a bird has ever seen flying?
Answer: 38,000 feet
While light aircraft typically fly at around 12,000 feet and modern aircraft fly between 30,000 and 42,000 feet. In contrast, most garden birds rarely fly above 2,000 feet, and there are some waterfowl that fly as high as 4,000 feet.
Mallard ducks have been seen to fly up to 20,000 feet, while whooper swans can reach up to 37,000 feet.
However, the world record goes to a Ruppell’s griffon – a type of vulture with a wingspan of 3 meters. It was recorded flying at 38,000 feet. Unfortunately, the bird responsible was only discovered after being sucked into an airplane engine.
It did not survive its encounter.
9. How many hairs are there on a typical human head, to the nearest thousand?
Answer: 10,000
Human hairs are between 0.02 and 0.2 millimeters thick and grow on average about 10 to 15 millimeters per month. While not everyone has the same amount of hair – some are more follically endowed than others – we have an average of about 10,000 hairs on our heads.
Naturally blonde people have more hair than average, while people with red hair have less than average.
10. What is the name of the red liquid that seeps out of a piece of beef or rare steak?
Answer: Myoglobin
Unlike blood, the fluid that comes out of flesh is transparent and a duller red than the blood that circulates through the body.
Blood contains a protein complex called hemoglobin, which binds and transports oxygen from the lungs throughout the body.
Each hemoglobin carries four oxygen molecules. Myoglobin, on the other hand, contains only a single oxygen molecule.
It acts as a temporary storehouse of oxygen in muscle tissue before it is put to use.
11. Who invented the traditional light bulb?
Answer: Joseph Swan
While Thomas Edison is widely credited with inventing the light bulb, it was actually Sir Joseph Wilson Swan who demonstrated a light bulb lamp that used a carbon filament eight months before Edison in 1879.
However, Swan did not apply for a patent. Fortunately, a court ruled that Swan got their first and rejected Edison’s claim. The pair went on to form a joint company – the Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company.
12. How many computers did former IBM chairman Thomas Watson predict the world would need?
Answer: 5
While there is some doubt as to whether Thomas J Watson made the prediction at all, it is generally accepted that he echoed the sentiment of the 1940s in predicting that the world would only need five computers.
He turns out to be very wrong and there are an estimated 2 billion desktop computers in circulation and almost as many smartphones.
13. What did Albert Einstein issue US patent number 1781541 for in 1930?
Answer: The refrigerator
While he may have developed the theories that form much of the foundation of modern physics, helped scientists unravel the mystery of black holes and paved the way for the atomic bomb, Einstein only patented one invention.
Together with his colleague and former student, Leo Szilard, Einstein patented a refrigerator design in which there were no moving parts and the coolant was kept under constant pressure.
It used a mix of two compounds, one of which could be extracted quickly to lower the pressure and thus the temperature. Unfortunately, the design was not widely used.
14. Why was Dolly the sheep called Dolly?
Answer: Named after Dolly Parton
Dolly the sheep caused a worldwide sensation when news of her birth broke. As the world’s first cloned sheep, she was cloned from a breast cell of a long-dead ewe.
Scientists behind the project cheekily named her Dolly after country singer Dolly Parton, who is famous for her impressive set of, er, lungs.
15. Which part of the tongue contains the salt-detecting taste buds?
Answer: Everything
The human tongue has between 3,000 and 8,000 taste buds, which are usually replaced every few weeks. The idea that taste buds are grouped by specific areas of the tongue dates back to the early 1900s, when a map of the tongue showing such zones that were more or less sensitive was misinterpreted.
In fact, this is a myth and taste buds are distributed over the surface of the tongue.
16. How long ago did our common ancestor live with mice?
Answer: 75 million years
Humans and mice share about 70 percent of the same genes. But the last time we shared a common ancestor was 75 million years ago, at the height of the dinosaurs’ reign.
It wasn’t until a massive asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago that our mammalian ancestors were able to thrive and rapidly evolve to fill the niches left by the now-extinct reptiles.
17. If there were no greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, what would the Earth’s average surface temperature be?
Answer: -18°C (-0.4°F)
Although carbon dioxide has gained a rather negative reputation in recent years for its role in climate change, it is in fact a vital part of our global climate and the reason why we currently have life on Earth.
Indeed, the combined effect of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases is helping to raise our planet’s temperature by about 33 degrees.
18. How many mirrors are there on the James Webb Space Telescope?
Answer: 18
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has a shiny giant mirror made of 18 gold-plated hexagons. This is about 21 feet (6.5 m) in diameter and collects and focuses light of various wavelengths, from visible light to infrared. These come from distant celestial bodies, such as stars and galaxies.
The gold improves the reflectivity of the mirrors, allowing them to reflect infrared light, which is what most astronomical objects emit.
19. What is the real name for “rocket science”?
Answer: Space travel
The scientific name for rocket science is perhaps the least fun term; space travel. It comes from the Greek word ‘astro’ meaning star and ‘nautes’ meaning sailor.
The field encompasses the design, development and operation of spacecraft and related technologies.
20. The oldest known animal of all time was a…
Answer: molluscs
Ming the clam was a mollusk of the species Arctic Islandsdiscovered off the coast of Iceland in 2006. Researchers have determined that Ming is at least 507 years old, making it the oldest living animal on record.
Unfortunately, during a research project in 2006, Ming was accidentally killed when researchers opened it to determine its age.