What Colour is the Sun? E-Book

Brian Clegg

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Why do your fingers go wrinkly in the bath? What kind of animal can have 21 limbs? Who would really win a fight between a T.Rex and Godzilla? Test your knowledge of all things scientific with the biggest, brightest and most mind-bending quiz book this side of the Big Bang. Featuring 100 brain-melting Q&As, with enlightening explanations provided throughout, this is the ultimate examination of what you know about space, chemistry, quantum physics, science fiction and much more.

Leseprobe

WHAT COLOUR IS THE SUN?

Also by Brian Clegg

Dice World

How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?

Inflight Science

Introducing Infinity: A Graphic Guide

Light Years

Science for Life

The Quantum Age

The Universe Inside You

WHAT COLOUR IS THE SUN?

MIND-BENDING SCIENCE FACTS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S BRIGHTEST QUIZ

BRIAN CLEGG

Published in the UK in 2016 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

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email: [email protected]

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ISBN: 978-178578-149-0 (US edition)

ISBN: 978-178578-122-3 (International edition)

Text copyright © 2016 Brian Clegg

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in PMN Caecilia by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK

by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For Gillian, Rebecca and Chelsea

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Science writer Brian Clegg studied physics at Cambridge University and specialises in making the strangest aspects of the universe – from infinity to time travel and quantum theory – accessible to the general reader. He is editor of www.popularscience.co.uk and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His previous books include How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?, Ten Billion Tomorrows, Science for Life, Light Years, Inflight Science, Build Your Own Time Machine, The Universe inside You, Dice World, The Quantum Age and Introducing Infinity: A Graphic Guide.

www.brianclegg.net

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With many thanks to my editor Duncan Heath, and everyone at the excellent Icon Books for their support. And with particular thanks to everyone who has said nice things about this book’s predecessor, How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?

CONTENTS

About the author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Quiz 1, Round 1: Biology

Q1. Wrinkly extremities

Q2. Asparagus pee

Q3. Does this bug you?

Q4. Twenty-one limb salute

Q5. Live and let live

Q6. Beginning with a flash in the pan

Q7. What was I doing?

Q8. Zircons are a scientist’s best friend

Quiz 1, Round 2: History of Science

Q1. Walking the Planck

Q2. What’s in a name?

Q3. No half measures

Q4. Adding with letters

Q5. Isaac’s tomes

Q6. Greek gyrations

Q7. Elementary, my dear Aristotle

Q8. A modest mind

Quiz 1, Round 3: Technology

Q1. Jet set

Q2. Glow-in-the-dark gadgets

Q3. Seeing from afar

Q4. Monkish business

Q5. Cyborg cockroach

Q6. Swinging time

Q7. Check mech

Q8. Home bytes

Quiz 1, Round 4: Mathematics

Q1. Taking sides

Q2. Mental challenge

Q3. Calculating conundrum

Q4. It’s all Greek to me

Q5. Number love

Q6. Symbolic significance

Q7. How long is a piece of string?

Q8. The Twilight Zone

Quiz 1, Round 5: Physics

Q1. Jolly genius

Q2. Law maker

Q3. Emmy award

Q4. Play your quarks right

Q5. Particle flavours

Q6. A massive question

Q7. Slugging it out

Q8. Squarking photinos

Quiz 1, Round 6: Pot Luck

Q1. Girdling the Earth

Q2. Not that again

Q3. Clock watching

Q4. Restricted diet

Q5. Is this germane?

Q6. The real alloy

Q7. Balloon follies

Q8. Trickle down phenomenon

Quiz 1, First Special Round: An Elementary Message

Quiz 1, Second Special Round: Telescopic Knowledge

Quiz 2, Round 1: All in the Mind

Q1. Picture this

Q2. Brain power

Q3. Memory module

Q4. A shocking experiment

Q5. The P factor

Q6. Enter the mad scientist

Q7. Oh, rats!

Q8. Dicing with chance

Quiz 2, Round 2: Science Fiction

Q1. Putting things into perspective

Q2. Bard in space

Q3. A frightening future

Q4. Game on

Q5. Dino duel

Q6. Ancient spacemen

Q7. Teleporting troubles

Q8. Tremendous tech

Quiz 2, Round 3: Miscellany

Q1. Metal miasma

Q2. Roman rounding

Q3. Scientific headcount

Q4. Crazy counting

Q5. Devilish science

Q6. Jurassic jaunt

Q7. Strange substance

Q8. Draw data

Quiz 2, Round 4: Space

Q1. Solar blues

Q2. Greeks in space

Q3. Live long and prosper

Q4. A distant light

Q5. Not macho

Q6. It’s in the stars

Q7. Ground control to Sputnik 1

Q8. Twinkle, twinkle

Quiz 2, Round 5: Quantum Stuff

Q1. Colour me confused

Q2. Subatomic shortcut

Q3. Blinded by the light

Q4. Strange sea

Q5. Light mill

Q6. Suspicious beards

Q7. Beam me up

Q8. Scientific cobblers

Quiz 2, Round 6: Chemistry

Q1. In your element

Q2. Superhero substance

Q3. The mysterious ore

Q4. Don’t get stung

Q5. Atomic shades

Q6. Carvone up the smell

Q7. The colour purple

Q8. Elementary lighting

Quiz 2, First Special Round: Daisy Chain

Quiz 2, Second Special Round: Unreal Scientists

Further reading

INTRODUCTION

What Colour Is the Sun? has a traditional quiz format. The book contains two quizzes, each with six rounds of eight questions, plus two themed ‘special rounds’ each offering up to ten points.

The chances are, though, that you will just enjoy the quiz by testing yourself, so the book is designed to be read through solo. Each answer is accompanied by illuminating information, so there is more to it than just getting the answer right. Of course, if you’re using the book as a pub quiz, you don’t need to include these parts.

If you are going to use the book in a real quiz, just copy the questions from the two special rounds and print out enough so that each team can have their own question sheet. You might like to use one of these as a ‘table’ round, which is left on the teams’ tables to answer between the other rounds.

A popular addition in quiz play is to allow each team to have a joker to use on a round of their choice (before they see the questions), which doubles their points in that round.

The little ‘while you’re thinking’ factoids after each question are primarily for your enjoyment, but depending on your audience, it might add to the fun to read them out when running a quiz.

Whichever way you use the book – enjoy it!

QUIZ 1

ROUND 1: BIOLOGY

QUESTION 1

Wrinkly extremities

Why do hands and feet go wrinkly in the bath?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

The ideal bathwater temperature is generally agreed to be around 38°C (100°F) – just over body temperature.

The skin on hands and feet reacts quite differently in a bath than does skin elsewhere on the body.

Skin is waterproof, yet surprisingly it wasn’t until 2012 that it was discovered how the waterproofing worked. It’s down to a layer of fat molecules called lipids with two water-repelling tails. Usually these molecules have the tails pointing in the same direction, but in the skin they point in opposite directions and are stacked together in a way that maximises waterproofing.

To give a better grip in the wet

We’ve all seen how the skin on our hands and feet goes wrinkly in the bath, and it’s common to assume that this is because the skin takes in water – but the hands and feet are just as waterproof as the rest of the body. Instead this is a nervous system reflex that scientists speculate is to give a better grip in wet conditions.

It has been known for 80 years that the wrinkling is not about taking on water. One key indicator is that it doesn’t take place if there is nerve damage in the locations where the skin wrinkling takes place, indicating that it is an action of the central nervous system. But it was only in 2011 that it was suggested that this reflexive action has a use – that it may have evolved because it proved valuable.

This was because wrinkly fingers and toes do have a practical benefit. They act like the indentations in a car tyre. Tyres have the best grip in the dry if they are slick, without any tread. But in the wet, the contoured surface of a road tyre provides channels for water to be taken away from the interface between the tyre and the tarmac, improving grip. Similarly, the wrinkles in our hands and feet work effectively to carry away water that would otherwise reduce our grip in the wet.

This hypothesis was tested by getting participants to pick up objects like marbles in both dry and wet conditions. When the hands were wet and had gained their wrinkling, they were better at picking up wet marbles than dry, wrinkle-free hands, but there was no difference when picking up dry marbles. The wrinkles, it seems, are human tyre treads for hand grip and to make it less likely we will fall over on wet surfaces.

Further reading: Nature Wrinkly

QUESTION 2

Asparagus pee

Some people don’t find their urine smelly after eating asparagus. Is this because they don’t produce the relevant chemical, or because they can’t smell it?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

We smell something when chemical molecules lock into olfactory receptors – cells at the back of the nose that have special proteins on their tips to accommodate specific molecular forms.

A human has around 450 olfactory receptors, about half the number that a dog has in its nose.

Women are generally better in smell-based tests than men. It has been suggested that this might be due to their having more cells (typically over 40 per cent more) in a region of the brain called the olfactory bulb, which is involved in processing the sense of smell.

It seems to be both (probably)

It has long been known that eating asparagus makes wee smell strange – but not why some people can’t detect the odour. There is still dispute over the detail, with some scientists claiming that everyone produces the distinctively scented urine after eating and that the variation comes entirely from whether or not our noses can detect it. But it seems likely that some of us don’t produce the chemical cocktail responsible for the smell and that others can’t detect it, even when it is definitely present. It doesn’t help that we aren’t totally sure which chemicals are behind the odour, though a compound called methanethiol is a prime suspect.

One of the reasons there is a dispute is that there have been significant variations in the results studies have produced, with the percentage who produce the strange-smelling urine found to be around 50 per cent in some studies and as much as 90 per cent in others. (It has been suggested that the variation may reflect a regional genetic variation.) Similarly, tests looking for the ability to detect the distinctive smell have produced results varying from 10 per cent to practically the entire population.

It’s not unusual for different studies to produce different results. Whenever a scientific test depends on humans describing a response, there is inevitably inaccuracy – and there may be genetic variations in populations around the world. But it is unusual to find such a distinctive split on whether or not something is happening at all. Asparagus is yet to fully give up its secrets.

Further reading: BBC Future – Asparagus

QUESTION 3

Does this bug you?

Is a bug a beetle?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

New beetles are being found all the time. In 2016, 24 new species of weevil were discovered in a single Australian collection alone.

The original Volkswagen Beetle car (properly the ‘Volkswagen Typ 1’) was often known as the Volkswagen Bug in the USA.

The ladybird, known as a ladybug in the USA, is a beetle.

No, a bug is not a beetle

Although the term ‘bug’ is used very loosely for practically any creepy-crawly (even as a term for a bacterial or viral infection), it actually has a very specific meaning. Both bugs and beetles are insects, but bugs are of the order Hemiptera and beetles are Coleoptera.

Practically speaking, there are two big differences between the two – in the mouth and the wings. A bug has a beak-like sucker of a mouth, ideal to suck the juices out of a plant – aphids, for instance, are bugs – or to suck dry a prey insect (or, in something like a bed bug, which is a true bug, to extract the blood from a human). By contrast, a beetle has a more conventional ‘chewing’ mouth for dealing with solid foods.

As for the wings, if bugs have wings (some don’t), they are fairly conventional membranes. But one of a beetle’s two pairs of wings has been adapted by evolution to become a protective outer casing, so that when the insect isn’t flying, the delicate proper wings are covered by the pair of ‘elytra’, as the casing wings are known.

There are far more types of beetle than of bug, with fewer than 100,000 types of bug identified to date, compared with well over 400,000 types of beetle – around a quarter of all known animals. It has been speculated the total number could be in the tens of millions. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote ‘The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other’. (Haldane is often quoted as saying the Creator had ‘an inordinate passion for beetles’, but this seems to be apocryphal.)

Further reading: The Collins Field Guide to Insects

QUESTION 4

Twenty-one limb salute

What kind of animal (undamaged and intact) can have 21 limbs?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

The formal definition of a limb is a part of the body separate from the head or trunk (or various other body parts depending on the kind of animal), so includes, for instance, arms, legs, wings and tentacles.

Centipedes can have around 30 legs (or many more), so could have 21 limbs by losing a few legs – but always have an even number when intact.

The majority of higher animals have an even number of legs – for example mammals have four, insects six and arachnids eight.

A starfish

Although a typical starfish has five limbs (usually called ‘arms’ because in locomotion they pull themselves along, rather than walk), the Crown of Thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) can have as many 21 arms. Starfish are unusual in commonly having an odd number of limbs, which they can regrow if lost. Confusingly, while the starfish’s limbs are called arms, the multiple projections from the underside of the arms are called tube feet.

Some argue that a kangaroo has five limbs, as the tail is used in locomotion, but this stretches a point – it is still a very different kind of limb from arms or legs.

The Crown of Thorns isn’t the champion arm grower of the starfish world – the Antarctic species Labidiaster annulatus, for example, can have as many as 40–50 limbs, described as rays, which look like very slim tentacles. Like a number of simpler animals, the starfish has radial symmetry – its body is symmetrical on rotation – rather than the bilateral symmetry (mirror symmetry of two sides), typical in more sophisticated animals from cockroaches to humans.

One of the starfish’s more impressive (if arguably somewhat disgusting) capabilities is to be able to digest food outside its body. It can extrude a section of its stomach, for instance inserting it between the shells of a bivalve mollusc. The stomach starts digesting the food externally, and then is withdrawn with the remainder of the food into the starfish’s body when the prey is broken down enough to be ingested.

Further reading: Invertebrates

QUESTION 5

Live and let live

Is a virus alive?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

School biology generally defines life as requiring seven processes: movement, nutrition, respiration, excretion, reproduction, sensing and growth.

Many viruses are among the smallest things that could be considered an organism, just 18–300 nanometres across.

Not all viruses attack humans, or even complex life – many prey on bacteria.

Yes and no: a virus is and isn’t alive

Award yourself a point for ‘yes’ and one for ‘no’, or two points for ‘yes and no’, ‘we don’t know’ or ‘it depends how you define “alive”’. There is no true agreement on whether or not a virus is alive. If you stick to the seven processes listed on the previous page, a virus isn’t alive because, for example, it doesn’t have a traditional metabolism. Neither does it have a built-in mechanism for reproduction; rather it hijacks the reproductive mechanism of another cell. In effect, a virus is a delivery mechanism for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) in order to reproduce and thrive.

When viruses were first discovered, they were thought to be simply smaller equivalents of bacteria, but once their reproduction method was identified, it became traditional to consider a virus to be not alive. However, a number of modern biologists question this argument, as the ‘process of life’ approach has severe limitations when working at the level of cells – for example, living human cells do not qualify as being alive if you apply the seven processes test to them.

Another argument against the dismissal of viruses from life is the discovery of extremely large mimiviruses which have more of the internal mechanisms that we would expect in a living organism than does a typical virus. And as recently as 2015 it was discovered by investigating genetic history that viruses share a range of properties with living cells and probably originated as more traditional cellular organisms which then shed complexity as an evolutionary benefit, rather than having always been so simple.

Overall, the jury is still out, but the evidence has swung somewhat towards viruses being alive.

Further reading: Reality’s Frame

QUESTION 6

Beginning with a flash in the pan

What is panspermia?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

Pan was the name of an Ancient Greek god, responsible for the mountains, wild areas, shepherds and their flocks, and fertility.

English words beginning with ‘pan’ are borrowing from the Greek word πᾶν, the neuter form of the word for ‘all’. It was widely used as a combined form in Greek words, such as panagia (all-holy) and panselene (of the full moon).

The ‘spermia’ part of the word is derived via Latin from the Ancient Greek verb ‘to sow’.

The theory that all life on Earth was seeded from space

Panspermia was originally defined as the theory that life derives from tiny germs, which supposedly spread through the air and started to grow when they met a suitable location. By the start of the 20th century, however, it had come to mean the idea that life did not originate on Earth, but arrived, probably on meteors and comets, from somewhere else in the universe. (The idea itself can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks, but the term was applied to it only in the last century.)

It’s fair to say that this has never been a mainstream theory, but it has had some notable supporters including Francis Crick, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe pointed out that a considerable amount of dust in space is organic, that it is possible for organic matter to exist as spores in space and to survive landing on Earth, and that life seems to have emerged around the time of the Late Heavy Bombardment when the Earth had an unusually high rate of asteroid impacts.

One of the attractions of panspermia is that it fits well with the difficulty of creating life and the way that all life appears to have a common ancestor – Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also suggested that panspermia could be responsible for the introduction of new diseases. However, most biologists are doubtful, arguing that panspermia adds an unnecessary complication and that in dealing with the difficulty of creating life, it merely pushes the boundary back to a different point in time and space.

Further reading: Reality’s Frame

QUESTION 7

What was I doing?

How long can a goldfish remember things?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

A goldfish joke: ‘Just because I have a [insert figure of your choice]-second memory, they don’t think I’ll mind eating the same fish flakes over and over … Oh, brilliant! Fish flakes!’

The goldfish is a member of the carp family.

The basic carp species that the goldfish was bred from is silver/ grey, but can be orange or red-coloured due to a mutation.

Goldfish remember things for several months at least

There is a common myth that goldfish have only a three-second memory span, hence the joke on the previous page. It’s not clear where this myth came from, but some have suggested that it originated with an advertisement (rarely a good source for science). Remarkably, the myth has become so strong that it has appeared in some scientific papers on the behaviour of fish (admittedly usually to contradict it).

There are clear practical examples, familiar to any goldfish keeper, that demonstrate the fishes’ memory working for longer than a few seconds. Goldfish, for example, learn to associate the rattling sound of a container of fish food with eating and will congregate, ready to be fed. There is also good evidence that goldfish have a degree of face recognition ability, and will often get more excited when their owner comes near (on the assumption that they will be fed) than a stranger.

The US Discovery Channel TV show Myth Busters took on the ‘three second’ myth in 2003 (broadcast in 2004) and demonstrated that a goldfish could recognise colour patterns and remember the route through a maze a month after learning it. In 2009, a Plymouth University team showed that goldfish could remember feeding prompts for at least three months.

Every few years, newspapers feature someone disproving the myth as if it had not been done before, suggesting, perhaps, that journalists have shorter memories than normal human beings.

Further reading: Learning in Fishes

QUESTION 8

Zircons are a scientist’s best friend

Forget diamonds: why do biologists love zircons when it comes to establishing the age of life on Earth?

Answer overleaf

While you’re thinking …

Zircon is a mineral that is primarily made up of zirconium silicate.

Although zircons are crystals, they tend to be small (mostly the size of sand grains) and are typically yellow, though they can be red, green, blue or colourless. Large colourless crystals are sometimes used in jewellery as a substitute for diamonds.

Although zircons are sometimes used in place of diamonds, they are a different compound to cubic zirconia – another, more popular faux diamond – which is a crystalline form of zirconium dioxide.

Zircons lock in small amounts of carbon, which can be used to infer the existence of early life

Zircons tend to hold impurities, including carbon, locked in when the crystals were formed, which can give an indication of the conditions on Earth at that time. The material is dated using uranium decay dating and results have suggested that some examples date from the early years after the formation of the Earth.

The presence of carbon is not, in itself, a definitive indicator of life; the carbon had to be here on Earth for the life to start from in the first place. But the interesting thing is the proportion of the different carbon isotopes that were locked away. Isotopes are variants of an atom with alternative numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. The most common version is carbon-12, with six protons and six neutrons. There is also the radioactive carbon-14 used in radiocarbon dating, with eight neutrons – but that technique is only useful for a few thousand years.

However, carbon comes in a third isotope, carbon-13, which has seven neutrons and is pretty much stable. The mechanisms that living organisms use to build up their cells have a preference for the smaller carbon-12 atoms, and so an accumulation of carbon from a living creature has slightly more carbon-12 than would be found in carbon that is simply part of a mineral deposit.

Zircons carrying the tell-tale extra carbon-12 have been found that are around 4 billion years old, making it seem likely that life had already started when the Earth was just 400–500 million years old. Which is why biologists love a zircon.

Further reading: Reality’s Frame