Scintillating Science! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Both blue and red

The pigments present in the leaves absorb mostly in the blue and red region of the visible spectrum. They are not capable of absorbing the green region of the spectrum. In other words, the green light is reflected by the plants and that's the reason why most of the flowering plants appear green.

Answer: Centigrade

Imagine 'centi-grade' being the name of a person!
G.D. Fahrenheit (1686-1736) was a German physicist who devised the scale.
Kelvin was a British physicist and Mathematician (1824-1907).
A. Celsius (1701-44) was a Swedish astronomer.

Answer: It is because of the different hormones present in males and females.

I have often wondered about this question. Did you know that each day you lose thousands of hairs? But don't worry, you gain thousands of hairs also; so in net no profit, no loss (welfare state). Baldness results when the hair loss exceeds its gain (simple arithmetic). Now the question that arises is why do males go bald when women don't? The answer to that is simple to understand even if it's not simple to accept. You must be aware that males contain high levels of the hormone testosterone. This is converted to dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by an enzyme so called 5-alpha reductase (the real culprit!). DHT causes weakening of hair which in turn leads to their loss. In females also the thinning of hair patches does take place to some extent but fortunately for them, it is uniform and their hairline does not recede so rarely do they go bald.

As to why is testosterone converted to DHT at all, I can only say God has been unkind to men.

Answer: Steel is more elastic than rubber because the Young's modulus of elasticity of steel is greater than that of rubber.

For rubber (especially vulcanized rubber), even if the length is increased to 8 times its natural length, it will come back to its original length if the stretching forces are removed. On the contrary, a steel wire breaks if its length is increased by about 30 percent. This may lead one to conclude that rubber is more elastic than steel.
However, the ratio of the magnitude of stress (restoring force per unit original cross-sectional area) to strain (change in length per unit original length) i.e. Young's modulus of elasticity is much larger in steel than in rubber. This means large internal forces appear if the steel wire is deformed. In this sense, steel is more elastic than rubber.
If you folks still don't believe me, take a rubber ball and a steel ball and drop them on the ground from the same height. See which bounces higher! (The steel ball will, of course.)

Answer: Oxygen (O)

Chalcogens are the group 16 elements in the periodic table sometimes known as the oxygen family.
Fluorine is a halogen (called so since it reacts with metals to form salts.) It is the first member of group 17.
Magnesium is an alkaline earth metal (group 2). It is so called because its oxide and hydroxide is alkaline in nature and is found in the earth's crust.
Scandium is a rare earth metal. The D and the F block elements are called rare earth metals because when they were discovered they were supposed to be scarce. Now the term has been dropped by IUPAC as most of these are fairly abundant.

Answer: Dry ice

It is also sometimes referred to as "Cardice" or as "card ice". The remaining options are just random words that I made up :P

Answer: No

The machines found in the gym don't exactly reduce human effort, do they?
A machine is actually defined simply as a structure consisting of a framework and various fixed &/or moving parts, for doing some kind of work.

Answer: 99.999

One mole is equal to 6.023 * 10^23. Bet even Bill Gates does not have this much money! P.S. - If you are wondering how this question is related to science at all, then let me tell you that mass in grams of one mole of any substance is numerically equal to its molecular mass in atomic mass units(amu).

This was first observed by Avogadro. In his honour, one mol is also known as Avogadro's no. You can derive the above mentioned relationship yourself given that 1 amu equals 1.66 * 10^-27 kgs. You may like to use a calculator. Actually, 6.023*10^23 and 1.66*10^-24 are simply reciprocals of each other.

Answer: Checker Shadow illusion

I'm sure you know what an illusion is.
Check out the Dragon illusion here: http://www.grand-illusions.com/images/articles/opticalillusions/dragon_illusion/dragon_illusion.wmv
Hollow Face illusion and Einstein Mask illusion are also of similar types.
If you search on the web, you can find quite a lot of information about this particular illusion. A good article comes from Richard Gregory - http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/knowl_illusion/knowledge-in-perception.pdf
You can try out the Dragon illusion for yourself if you wish: http://www.grand-illusions.com/images/articles/opticalillusions/dragon_illusion/dragon.pdf
The effect is amazing. This is a PDF file, a 244k download. Once you have printed the dragon out (a colour printer is best since this is a colour image) then you can cut out the dragon, fold and stick it as per the given instructions, and you will be able to see this fantastic illusion yourself.
To view the Checker Shadow illusion, go to http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_adelson_check_shadow/index.html
(This one is almost impossible to believe.)

Answer: She will die.

Oxygen needs extremely high pressure and/or extremely low temperature to exist in liquid form, to an extent far beyond what any life can withstand.