UPSC GK Questions 2026

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for groundbreaking experiments on graphene, the single atom thick sheet of carbon they had lifted from graphite with ordinary adhesive tape.

The Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima, then at the NEC laboratory, reported multi walled carbon nanotubes in 1991 using a transmission electron microscope, and the date and the name are the facts asked.

Buckminsterfullerene, discovered in 1985, has sixty carbon atoms arranged in a closed cage of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, exactly the pattern of a stitched football, and the twelve pentagons are what allow a flat hexagonal sheet to curve into a closed ball.

The American physicist Richard Feynman delivered the talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom to the American Physical Society at Caltech in December 1959, in which he argued that there is no law of physics forbidding the manipulation of individual atoms, and the lecture is treated as the conceptual…

The Japanese engineer Norio Taniguchi used the word nanotechnology in 1974 to describe machining to tolerances of a nanometre, and that is the coinage examiners expect.

The prefix nano stands for ten raised to the power minus nine, so one nanometre is one billionth of a metre, which is also ten angstrom, and nanotechnology is defined as work in the band of one to one hundred nanometres.

Rana Kumbha of Mewar raised the nine-storeyed Vijay Stambha inside Chittorgarh fort in about 1448 to mark his victory over Mahmud Khilji of Malwa, and he also built the great hill fort of Kumbhalgarh, whose outer wall is among the longest fortification walls in the world.

The Gateway of India on the Apollo Bunder waterfront at Mumbai was designed by the Scottish architect George Wittet in a style that blends Gujarati work with Islamic arch forms, and it was completed in 1924 to commemorate the landing of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911.

Cave 16 at Ellora in Maharashtra, the Kailasa temple, was cut under the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I in the eighth century.

The Brihadeeswarar temple, also called the Rajarajeswaram, was completed by Rajaraja I at Thanjavur in about 1010 and is the first of the three Great Living Chola Temples inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

He built the Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha in the thirteenth century, designing the whole shrine as the chariot of the sun god with twelve pairs of carved stone wheels drawn by seven horses.

The Hawa Mahal, the five-storeyed screen of pink sandstone pierced by hundreds of small windows so that royal women could watch processions in the street unseen, was built at Jaipur in 1799 by Sawai Pratap Singh, with Lal Chand Ustad as its architect.

The Gol Gumbaz at Bijapur in Karnataka is the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah of the Adil Shahi dynasty and was finished in about 1656.

Bega Begum, also called Haji Begum because she had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, had the tomb built at Delhi from about 1565 and engaged the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas for it.

Aibak, the founder of the Slave or Mamluk dynasty of Delhi, laid the foundation of the Qutub Minar in 1199 and completed only its first storey.

Shah Jahan raised the Taj Mahal over the grave of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, and the court records name Ustad Ahmad Lahori as the chief architect of the work, which went on at Agra from about 1632 to 1653.

The Bahai House of Worship, known the world over as the Lotus Temple, stands at Bahapur near Kalkaji in New Delhi.

The International Solar Alliance was launched jointly by India and France at the Paris climate conference on 30 November 2015 to bring together countries lying largely between the tropics, and its headquarters is at Gwal Pahari in Gurugram, Haryana.

Free hydrogen does not occur in any usable quantity on earth, so it has to be made from water or from a hydrocarbon by spending energy, and it then stores and delivers that energy elsewhere.

A fuel cell converts the chemical energy of hydrogen directly into electrical energy without combustion, so it is not bound by the efficiency limit of a heat engine.