This Russian scientist is well-known for his studies into conditioned reflex, which he stumbled upon by analyzing the salivation rates of dogs.
Who is Ivan Pavlov?
100
This perennial herbaceous place was the first genetically engineered organism.
Hint: It's scientific genus is Nicotiana.
What is tobacco?
(In 1983 the first tobacco plant was developed to resist various herbicides.)
100
Pythagoras, though not the first person to use this famous and useful equation, was the first person to work out its proof.
What is a-squared + b-squared = c-squared?
100
Maria Goeppert-Mayer won the 1963 Nobel prize in Physics for her development of a new model of this structure, which makes up the center of an atom.
What is the nucleus?
100
This eccentric Texas entrepreneur, famous for his fortune and stewardship of TWA, created HHMI with the bold vision to investigate "the genesis of life itself."
Who is Howard Hughes?
200
This abbreviation denotes metabolic equivalent, which stands for 3.5 mL of oxygen per kilogram of body mass per minute and which is used to represent the intensity of exercise.
Newton's second law describes this vector quantity (with both magnitude and direction), which can cause the change in velocity of an object with mass.
What is force?
200
This Polish-born physicist and chemist studied radioactivity and is the only person to have ever won in Nobel prizes in multiple sciences.
Who is Madame Curie (aka Marie Skłodowska-Curie)?
(She was also the first woman to win a Nobel prize and is the only woman to have won in two different fields.)
200
The name of the summer collaborative student-faculty research program that is part of the HHMI-Southwestern Inquiry Initiative?
Hint: Stands for "Summer Collaborative Opportunities"
What is SCOPE?
300
This large cat species can handily beat Usain Bolt in a 100 meter dash by more than 3 seconds.
What is the cheetah?
300
The most common element in the human body....
What is oxygen?
(Oxygen makes up about 63% of the average human, followed by carbon, then hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and other).
300
In this law of Newtonian physics, an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion until acted upon by an external force.
What is the First Law? (aka Law of Inertia)
300
Last year, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka received the Nobel prize for discovering how mature cells could be converted back to these important cells, perhaps helping to reduce the controversy surrounding the research of these pluripotent cells.
What are stem cells?
300
The amount of money the Inquiry Initiative received from HHMI's science education initiative in order to create more thought-provoking classes and research experiences.
What is $1.3 million?
400
Despite contributing only 2% of total human body weight, this organ can use up as much energy as 20% of the resting metabolic rate. That's about 10.8 calories per hour!
What is the brain?
400
This substance, the hardest naturally occurring substance, are formed almost entirely of carbon.
What is the diamond?
(Diamonds are the most "enduring" gemstones due to their hardness. They are so expensive because they are relatively rare.)
400
The nucleus, the tail, and the coma make up part of this small Solar System body that can be seen with the unaided eye from Earth.
What is a comet?
400
In 2009, Ada E. Yonath was the co-winner of the Nobel prize for important insights made into these sub-cellular structures which fabricate proteins.
What are ribosomes?
400
The type of laboratories and classes the Inquiry Initiative promotes, which include ditching "cookbook" labs for labs in which students and professors work together to develop research questions and methods. These are known for improving students' critical thinking skills.
What are inquiry-based (labs and classes)?
500
The area of brain most crucial to the creation of memory.
What is the hippocampus?
500
This famous series of chemical reactions used in all aerobic organisms is also known as the the Szentgyorgyi-Krebs cycle, after the Hungarian and German scientists credited with its discovery.
What is the Citric Acid Cycle?
(a.k.a. the tricarboxylic acid cycle)
500
This condition, when three celestial bodies arrange in a straight line, is seen during solar and lunar eclipses.
What is syzgy?
500
Dr. Mario Molina, a Mexican-born scientist who now has an asteroid named after him, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for describing how pollution destroys this part of the atmosphere.
What is the ozone?
500
The type of learning or class activities that occur outside the Southwestern bubble that help students better understand material and (hint!) engage in their community?
(Also promoted by the Inquiry Initiative.)