Check Your Ps and Qs Trivia Quiz

Answer: Starts with P

Pulsars, a kind of very dense star, were first observed by Dame Jocelyn Bell in 1967. The first was discovered in August, and another was found in December of that year. They originally called the strange radio signal LGM-1, since they seemed to come from "little green men" - aliens. The radio bursts from LGM-1 "pulsed" every 33 milliseconds. Interestingly, another astrophysicist, Franco Pacini, proposed that the then-hypothetical neutron star could be capable of spinning rapidly and generating a magnetic charge, which could then be detected by telescopes. This is exactly what a pulsar is: a neutron star which spins a magnetic pole around like the beam of a lighthouse.

I'm hoping I tricked some of you with "quasar"! Quasars are another astronomical phenomenon. They are the brightest things in the universe, created in the "accretion disks" of black holes - essentially huge clumps of dust that generates heat as it "clogs" the outside of the hole.

Answer: Starts with Q

Quicklime, a.k.a calcium oxide or just lime, is a white, powdery alkaline produced by heating substances like seashells, which are rich in calcium carbonate. Quicklime has had a myriad of uses since ancient times. In cooking, quicklime can be mixed with water to create a flameless source of heat. Limewater is also used to "nixtamalize" corn to make tortillas. Because it has a melting point in excess of 2500 degrees C, lime is used for steelmaking. The phrase "in the limelight" derives from a use of lime in theater: before electricity, a bright spotlight could be produced by heating lime in a glass cylinder. The first man to use limelight, Thomas Drummond, used it for surveying atop the summits of Ireland. He claimed his limelights could illuminate things over 100 kilometers away.

Potash, another industrial, synthetic alkali, is wrong; it's the name given to several potassium compounds, not calcium compounds.

Answer: Starts with Q

Quaternary period - You are here. Earth entered the Quaternary period 2.58 million years ago. The past geologic period has been one of continual ice ages. Geologically speaking, since the poles are still covered in ice, we are still considered to be in an ice age, albeit we are in the "interglacial" period of our ice age. The interglacial period denotes the epoch referred to as the Holocene. The Holocene began about 12,000 years ago. The previous epoch, the Pleistocene, concluded with a major extinction of many large mammals, among them sabre-tooths, mammoths, and giant sloths.

The term "Anthropocene epoch," which suggests human impacts on the planet have altered the geologic time-scale, was rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences in 2024.

Answer: Starts with P

Pahoehoe is the slower-moving of the two Hawaiian lava flows; the faster kind is called a'a. These distinctive flows arise because the lava of Hawaiian volcanoes is rich in iron. This is why so much of the rock you see in pictures of Hawai'i is black basalt. A'a flows move fast in broad lava rivers, and leave behind a rock that's chunky, jagged, and in places sharp. At the slower-moving "bank" of a river of a'a, the lava may partially cool to form strings of "clinkers," and these strings are sometimes still visible in the cooled lava rock. But when you think of a stereotypical Hawaiian volcano, you probably think of pahoehoe: globs pooling outward like pancake batter, with the exterior of the lava beginning to harden as the hot interior continues to flow.

One clue to this question is that the Hawaiian alphabet has only eight consonants, and Q isn't one of them.

Answer: Starts with P

Protons - and not quarks. Quarks, which (among other things) are the building blocks of protons, have variable masses. A proton weighs just shy of one dalton, defined as one-twelfth of a carbon-12 atom (the mass of which is almost entirely made up of its six neutrons and six protons) The lighter up and down quarks have masses of less than one-ten thousandth of a proton, while the most massive, top quarks, are as heavy as a gold atom. Protons were discovered when, in 1917, Ernest Rutherford bombarded nitrogen with radium.

The particle he detected from the decayed nitrogen he first called "hydrogen nuclei" (technically not wrong), but later christened the proton. Quarks were first hypothesized by Murray Gell-Mann and separately by George Zweig.

In 1968 a new technique - basically an improvement on the method Rutherford invented - confirmed the existence of quarks.

Answer: Starts with Q

Did you figure out I meant a QWERTY keyboard? The first commercial typewriter used the layout, designed by Charles Sholes. The arrangement of the letters was chosen to prevent common combinations of letters from being typed with the same hand. If, say, you put I-N-G next to each other on the left, a fast typist could jam the machine by having the bars knock into each other.

He also intentionally aligned the letters in TYPEWRITER on the first row. A lot of people like to point out that Shole's QWERTY layout is not an optimal layout for uncommon pairs, as if that were the point; the fact is QWERTY mitigated the problem it was designed to solve and became standard throughout the Latin script-using world. Of course, many other functional layouts are possible.

Some countries have modified QWERTY to suit their needs: Germany, for example, uses QWERTZ because T and Z occur next to each other in lots of words.

Answer: Starts with Q

The compound is called quinine, and it naturally blocks the plasmodia parasites from dissolving hemoglobin in the host's blood. Quinine is naturally extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree. Tonic water was originally sold as a medicine ("tonic" as in "restorative"), but British soldiers who were required to drink it quickly found that its intense bitterness paired nicely with gin. Nowadays, there's so little quinine in tonic that it doesn't really work as medicine.

It's simply added for the flavor. Cinchona also flavors Barolo Chinato, Malaga wine, and Irn-Bru, Scotland's favorite soda.

Answer: Starts with P

Pluto lost its planetary status in 2006. The dwarf planet Eris (brilliantly named for the Greek goddess of discord) was discovered to be almost as large and more massive than Pluto. The International Astronomical Union had to decide whether to include Eris as a new planet, or to count the obviously distinct, tiny, rocky objects as their own class. Hence the "dwarf planet." This also clarified the place of Ceres, the largest asteroid, which had already lost its planetary designation in the 19th century.

As a matter of fact, there is a Kuiper belt dwarf planet beginning with Q: "Quaoar." Quaoar is a particularly strange object: in 2023 it was found to have rings orbiting it, despite the fact that it's smaller than our own moon, Pluto, and even Pluto's moon Charon. By our current understanding that should not be *possible,* yet there they are.

Answer: Starts with P

The word is "ptarmic," which can also be a noun describing a ptarmic substance. If you like your roots more Latin than Greek, you can use the synonym "sternutatory." Strangely, there has not been any scientific research that explores the reason black pepper makes us sneeze, so it's a bit of a mystery.

The oldest surviving film that had a copyright is "Fred Ott's Sneeze", a three-second clip of our man Fred imbibing snuff and sneezing it out. There's also a plant called Achillea ptarmica, commonly named "sneezewort" or "sneezeweed."

Answer: Starts with Q

The hyponychium is your quick, the thickened skin on the extremity of your nailbed. It forms the "seal" between the free-hanging part of your fingernail and the sensitive nailbed underneath. This is the "quick" in "cut to the quick," i.e., cutting your fingernails too short. Youch.

In many older words (including "quicklime" and "quicksilver," liquid mercury), the word "quick" is used in the sense of "alive." On the opposite side of the hyponychium is the eponychium, those folds behind your cuticle. "-Nychium" in both words is Greek for "little claw."

Answer: Starts with P

"Pedology," from the Greek "pedon" meaning "ground," is the part of soil science that studies the formation, composition, geography, and evolution over time of different kind of soils. From a physical science perspective, the soil is where the air, land, water, and living creatures meet, and these all alter the soil in various ways. Five factors determine the unique character of a soil: local climate, topography, living creatures, the age of the soil, and the parent material of the soil. Parent material informs the mineral makeup of the soil and develops from either the underlying bedrock or from an aboveground source - glaciers, water, or gravity depositing soil from elsewhere, or the decomposition of plants (think peat).

Answer: Starts with Q

These movements are called quickening. In most pregnancies, the mother will feel quickening between weeks 16 and 20 weeks. They're one of the best indicators that the baby is developing naturally. Quickening can feel like tummy-tickling or a pulsation. Because the muscles of the uterus are more sensitive than the abdominal muscles, the mother can feel quickening before movements can be detected through external means.

Answer: Starts with Q

This type of curve is called a quadratrix, and they date to antiquity with efforts to square the circle. The name, as you may have suspected, comes from "quadrater," i.e. "squarer." The Athenian polymath Hippias (who is unfortunately remembered as a subject of ridicule from both Plato and Plutarch) devised a quadratrix that could generate a squared circle. You can define Hippias's quadratrix in a quadrant as the path of intersections of a radius rotating around the origin and a straight horizontal line moving up or down the quadrant at the same speed. Along this curve, the angle of the radius will be proportional to the height of the curve, and you can use it to create a side-length that matches the circle's circumference.

The catch is that to actually produce a quadratrix, you need to use a combination of liner and angular movement.

The "classical" problem of circle-squaring requires only the use of a straightedge and a compass, i.e., angular and linear movement kept separate.

Answer: Stats with Q

This was Planck's reason for coining quantum physics ("quantum" sharing a root with "quantity"). Specifically, Planck sought to explain the theoretical inconsistency in a "blackbody," a hypothetical object that absorbs radiation that contacts it, then emits light based on its temperature alone. Logically, an object that continued to absorb all energy would emit infinite energy. However, when studying lab-made blackbody approximations called "cavity radiators", this was obviously not true. Therefore, Planck reasoned, energy is *not* continuous, but instead discrete. It arrives in "quanta," the "minimum amount that can exist." Nowadays, we use "quantum physics" to mean the study of any physics interaction at minimum scale.


(The quotation is attributed to Planck's 1900 paper, "Theory of the Law of Energy Distribution in the Normal Spectrum." I pulled the translated quotation from the Etymonline dictionary entry for "quantum.")

Answer: Starts with P

Piezoelectricity ("piezo" is Greek for "to squeeze") refers to the electric charge generated when a crystal is squeezed or stressed. Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered piezoelectric properties in quartz, topaz, tourmaline and sugar. The most famous use-cases for piezoelectricity are as the timekeeping mechanism inside of quartz watches and as a way to operate the inkjet of a printer. Interestingly, piezoelectricity works both ways: you can shock a crystal to deform it, and this reverse-piezoelectric shifting creates the sound waves in an ultrasound.

Closely related is triboelectricity, caused by breaking rather than deforming bonds. Triboelectricity has such illustrious use-cases as making Lifesavers glow in the dark when you snap them, and making your hair stick to a staticky balloon.