Life Under the Microscope
In this slimy state, bacterial resistance to antibiotics can jump by up to a factor of a thousand.
What is a biofilm?
This organ uses about 20 percent of your resting energy budget despite making up only about 2 percent of body mass.
What is the brain?
This element, used in party balloons, is so rare on Earth that most commercial supplies come from deep natural gas wells.
What is helium?
These ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein were first directly detected in 2015.
What are gravitational waves?
This scientist wrote more about alchemy and biblical chronology than physics, despite being remembered for the laws of motion.
Who is Isaac Newton?
Of all known genomes, this organism currently holds the record for the largest, with over 100 billion base pairs.
What is the "A 160 Gbp fork fern" plant?
The ferns (Polypodiopsida or Polypodiophyta) are a group of vascular plants
This type of muscle fiber is fatigue-resistant and relies mostly on oxidative metabolism.
What are type I (slow-twitch) fibers?
This is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
What is mercury?
This planet has winds so fast that its clouds circle the globe in less than five Earth days, despite its sluggish surface rotation.
What is Venus?
This chemist lost his nose in a duel and later created the first modern model of the periodic table.
Who is Dmitri Mendeleev?
(The nose-less duelist was Tycho Brahe, not Mendeleev.)
This cellular organelle was once a free-living microbe that merged with early eukaryotes.
What is the mitochondrion?
This hormone, discovered in the 1990s, is released from fat cells and signals energy status to the brain.
What is leptin?
This pH phenomenon explains why carbonated drinks taste sharper when cold.
What is increased CO₂ solubility leading to more carbonic acid?
This effect causes GPS satellites to tick at a different rate than clocks on Earth.
What is gravitational time dilation?
This woman calculated the orbital mechanics that saved Apollo 13, earning her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
This water creature can revert its mature cells back into stem-like states, allowing it to return to a juvenile form.
What is Turritopsis dohrnii, the “immortal jellyfish”?
This reflex can persist in adults if there’s upper motor neuron damage, but in infants it’s completely normal.
What is the Babinski sign?
Diamond and graphite differ only in how the atoms bond, making them examples of this chemical concept.
What are allotropes?
This moon of Saturn has lakes made not of water but of liquid methane and ethane.
What is Titan?
This early microscopist coined the word “cell” after examining cork.
Who is Robert Hooke ? 1665 (1635-1703)