General Science Mixed Quiz: Set 135

In 1800 he passed sunlight through a prism and moved a thermometer across the coloured band; the reading went on rising past the red end, which showed the presence of an invisible heating radiation now called infrared.

The hyoid is a U-shaped or horseshoe-shaped bone lying in the front of the neck below the lower jaw; it is held in place only by muscles and ligaments and forms no joint with any other bone, which is why it supports the tongue and helps in speech and swallowing.

In a binomial name the first word is the genus and is written with a capital initial letter, while the second word is the species epithet and is written entirely in small letters; both are italicised in print and underlined separately in handwriting.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is the statutory body that lays down standards for food and regulates its manufacture, storage, sale and import across India.

A remote control carries a small light emitting diode that sends coded pulses of near infrared, which a sensor in the set decodes; the radiation is invisible, harmless at that power and does not pass through walls, so remotes in neighbouring rooms do not interfere.

Germanium is not used to build light emitting diodes because it is an indirect band gap semiconductor, so an electron falling back across the gap gives up most of its energy as heat in the crystal rather than as light.

Neem is Azadirachta indica, a tree valued in Indian medicine for its leaves, bark and oil, and it is remembered in current affairs as well because a European patent on a neem based fungicide was revoked after India challenged it.

In spontaneous combustion a substance catches fire by itself, without any external flame being brought near it.

Ozone in the stratosphere absorbs most of the harmful shorter ultraviolet, and that is why the thinning of the layer by chlorofluorocarbons raises the risk of skin cancer, cataract and damage to crops; the small part of ultraviolet that does reach the surface makes vitamin D in human skin.

In 1983 the American company Eli Lilly put the DNA sequences of the A and B chains of human insulin into Escherichia coli, produced the two chains separately and joined them by disulphide bonds to make a hormone identical to the human one; it was sold as Humulin, the first…

Bombyx mori is the mulberry silkworm, the insect reared in sericulture, whose larva spins the cocoon from which mulberry silk is reeled, and the word mori refers to the mulberry on whose leaves it feeds.

The velocity ratio of a pulley system is the distance moved by the effort divided by the distance moved by the load, so it is 12 divided by 3, that is 4.

Maxwell showed that this speed is fixed by the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability of free space, and its agreement with the measured speed of light was the proof that light is an electromagnetic wave; every band of the spectrum shares the same value in vacuum.

All three statements describe hard water correctly. Statement 1 is correct: temporary hardness comes from dissolved bicarbonates, chiefly calcium bicarbonate (magnesium bicarbonate too).

Turmeric is Curcuma longa, a rhizome of the ginger family whose yellow colour comes from curcumin, and it is well known in the intellectual property story in which a United States patent on the use of turmeric for wound healing was revoked after India produced evidence of traditional knowledge.

The receptors that pick up taste are called gustatory receptors, and they sit inside the taste buds on the tongue.

Visible light runs from about 400 nanometres at the violet end to about 700 nanometres at the red end, so violet has the shortest wavelength, the highest frequency and the greatest energy of the seven colours remembered as VIBGYOR.

The lotus, declared the national flower of India, is Nelumbo nucifera, an aquatic plant rooted in the mud of ponds and tanks with leaves and flowers held above the water, and it carries a long place in Indian art and religion.

A light year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one year at about 3 into 10 to the power 8 metres per second, which works out to roughly 9.46 into 10 to the power 12 kilometres; astronomers use it because distances between stars are awkward to write…

The potato is Solanum tuberosum, and the epithet tuberosum points to the tuber, a swollen underground stem rather than a root, which is the part eaten; the plant belongs to the nightshade family and reached India through the Portuguese.