Science Fun Facts
This is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
What is Mercury?
This “father of modern genetics” worked with pea plants to discover inheritance patterns.
Who is Gregor Mendel?
This basic imaging tool uses glass lenses to magnify cells or bacteria.
What is light microscopy (or just microscopy)?
The basic unit of heredity that carries genetic information.
What is a gene?
The nucleotide that pairs with adenine in DNA.
What is thymine?
The fastest land animal, capable of 60–70 mph in short bursts.
What is the cheetah?
This X‑ray crystallographer’s “Photo 51” was crucial to the discovery of DNA’s double helix.
Who is Rosalind Franklin?
The color‑staining method that differentiates bacteria into Gram‑positive and Gram‑negative groups.
What is the Gram stain?
The shape of the DNA molecule, a double-stranded helix.
What is the double helix?
A chart that shows the inheritance pattern of traits in a family over generations.
What is a pedigree?
This planet is known as the Red Planet.
What is Mars?
She discovered radioactivity and is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Who is Marie Curie?
The CRISPR‑associated protein that makes a precise cut in DNA.
What is Cas9?
This was the first antibiotic discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928.
What is penicillin?
A term for genes located on the same chromosome that tend to be inherited together.
What is genetic linkage?
The number of bones in an adult human body.
What is 206?
He proposed that “all mass attracts all other mass” in his law of universal gravitation.
Who is Isaac Newton?
The method of amplifying a specific DNA segment millions of times in vitro.
What is PCR (polymerase chain reaction)?
The phenomenon by which plants convert light energy into chemical energy.
What is photosynthesis?
The phenomenon where one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits.
What is pleiotropy?
This phenomenon makes the sky look blue by scattering shorter wavelengths of light.
What is Rayleigh scattering?
She discovered messenger RNA (mRNA) and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2009) for her work on transcription.
Who is Elizabeth Blackburn?
A microscopy technique that uses a laser to scan a specimen point‑by‑point for high‑resolution 3D images.
What is confocal microscopy?
The 1953 experiment that showed DNA strands are semi‑conservative.
What is the Meselson–Stahl experiment?
A cross between two heterozygotes that yields a 1:2:1 genotype ratio in the offspring.
What is a monohybrid cross?