Trivia_Pau2

SCIENCE

1. Sharks have no bones! Their skeletons are made of cartilage. Sharks renew their teeth throughout their lives; as one tooth breaks off or wears out, another one rotates forward from the inside of the jaw to replace it.

2. What radioactive element is extracted from carnotite and pitchblende? Uranium

==> The discovery of the element is credited to the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth. While he was working in his experimental laboratory in Berlin in 1789, Klaproth was able to precipitate a yellow compound (likely sodium diuranate) by dissolving pitchblende in nitric acid and neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide.[11] Klaproth mistakenly assumed the yellow substance was the oxide of a yet-undiscovered element and heated it with charcoal to obtain a black powder, which he thought was the newly discovered metal itself (in fact, that powder was an oxide of uranium).[11][12] He named the newly discovered element after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered eight years earlier by William Herschel.[13]

3. What explosive jelly is combined with gasoline to make incendiary bombs? Napalm.

==> Napalm is the name given to any of a number of flammable liquids used in warfare, often jellied gasoline. Napalm is actually the thickener in such liquids, which when mixed with gasoline makes a sticky incendiary gel. Developed by the U.S. in World War II by a team of Harvard chemists led by Louis Fieser, its name is a combination of the names of its original ingredients, coprecipitated aluminium salts of naphthenic and palmitic acids. These were added to the flammable substance to cause it to gel.[

4. What are you shopping for if you are sized up by a Brannock Device? Shoe

==> The Brannock Device is a measuring instrument invented by Charles F. Brannock for computing a person's shoe size. The son of a shoe industry entrepreneur, Brannock spent two years developing a simple means of measuring the length, width and arc length of the human foot. He eventually improved on the wooden RITZ Stick, the industry standard of the day, and patented his first prototype in 1926. The device has both left and right heel cups and is rotated through 180 degrees to measure the second foot. Brannock later formed the Brannock Device Company to manufacture and sell the product, and headed the company until 1992 when he died at age 89. Today, the Brannock Device is an international standard of the footwear industry, and the Smithsonian Institution houses samples of some of the first Brannock Devices.
The Brannock Device Company was headquartered in Syracuse, New York, until shortly after Charles Brannock's death. Salvatore Leonardi purchased the company from the Brannock Estate in 1993, and moved manufacturing to a small factory in Liverpool, New York. The company continues to manufacture several models of the device for determining the shoe sizes of men, women, and children; they also produce specialized models for fitting other types of footwear.

5. What tropical disease were mental patients intentionally infected with in the early 1900s as a treatment for insanity? Malaria.

==> Malaria is a vector-borne infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites; Malaria is one of the most common infectious diseases and an enormous public health problem. The disease is caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium.

6. What number, a one followed by 100 zeroes, was first used by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta in 1940? Googol

==>Googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta (1911–1981), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination (1940).
Googol is of the same order of magnitude as the factorial of 70 (70! being approximately 1.198 googol, or 10 to the power 100.0784), and its only prime factors are 2 and 5 (100 of each). In binary it would take up 333 bits.
Googol is of no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other incredibly large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of possible chess games. Edward Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics.