Science & Technology Mixed Quiz: Set 34

Each nucleotide of DNA carries a phosphate group, and the phosphate backbone gives the whole molecule a net negative charge at the pH used in the laboratory.

The Large Hadron Collider occupies a circular tunnel about 27 kilometres around, lying roughly 100 metres below the ground on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and it is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built; the tunnel was originally dug for an earlier CERN machine, the Large Electron-Positron…

These are the two general purpose detectors on the LHC ring, and in July 2012 both independently reported a new particle of about 125 giga-electronvolts that matched the Higgs boson, the particle linked to the field that gives mass to other particles; the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2013 went…

Working at the University of Leicester in 1984, Alec Jeffreys found that certain short sequences, the minisatellites or variable number tandem repeats, repeat a different number of times in different people, and that a pattern made from them identifies an individual.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 as an international public effort coordinated in the United States by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, with laboratories in several countries taking part.

LiFi (Light Fidelity) sends data wirelessly by switching LED light on and off far too fast for the eye to notice, and it can be many times faster than WiFi.

ITER is coming up at Saint-Paul-les-Durance in the Cadarache area of southern France, and its seven partners are the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States; the name is the Latin word for the way.

The Hounsfield unit, named after Godfrey Hounsfield, expresses how strongly a small volume of tissue attenuates X-rays, on a scale fixed by definition at zero for water and minus one thousand for air.

The polymerase chain reaction, invented by Kary Mullis in 1983, repeats three steps: the DNA is denatured near ninety-five degrees Celsius, short primers anneal at a lower temperature, and the strand is extended at about seventy-two degrees.

The layered structure of graphite can accept lithium ions between its sheets, a process called intercalation, and release them again without breaking down, which is what makes the cell rechargeable over hundreds of cycles.

This institute of the Department of Atomic Energy is the national centre for plasma and fusion research, it houses the domestic agency ITER-India that supplies India share of the machine, and it operates India own tokamaks Aditya and SST-1, the Steady State Superconducting Tokamak.

Global Positioning System satellites orbit at about 20,200 kilometres, which lies in the medium Earth orbit band stretching from 2,000 kilometres up to the geostationary height of 35,786 kilometres.

In the Watson and Crick model the two strands are held together by hydrogen bonds between complementary bases: adenine pairs with thymine through two hydrogen bonds and guanine pairs with cytosine through three.

The National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research is at Vasco-da-Gama in Goa and works under the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

A hydrogen bomb, also called a thermonuclear bomb, uses a fission explosion only as a trigger; the main energy comes from the fusion of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees, which is why the process is described as thermonuclear or thermal…

Under the reforms of 2020 and the Indian Space Policy of 2023, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre is the single-window autonomous body that authorises, promotes, hand-holds and supervises the space activities of non-government entities, and that permits them to use the facilities of the Department of Space.

The Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics was established in 1995 as an autonomous institution of the Department of Biotechnology and works at Hyderabad on DNA fingerprinting services, diagnostics of genetic disorders and research in genomics.

Fusion is the joining of two light nuclei into a heavier one, with a neutron or other products released and a large amount of energy appearing because the mass of the product is slightly less than the mass of the reactants; in ITER the reaction fuses deuterium and tritium into…

The Genome India Project was launched in January 2020 by the Department of Biotechnology, which works under the Ministry of Science and Technology, and brings together about twenty academic institutions to sequence Indian genomes and build a reference set that reflects the country's genetic diversity.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time thrown out by violent events such as the merger of two black holes, and they follow from the general theory of relativity that Einstein published in 1915, with the prediction of the waves set out in 1916.