Our questions have three levels of difficulty:
a. is for civilians
b. is for geeks
c. is for brainiacs
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Q1: Dinosaur evolution
a. Where does the name “dinosaur” come from?
b. Which is the nearest fossil relative of a chicken: pterodactyl, tyrannosaurus or woolly mammoth?
c. What is the name of the first fossil bird to be found?
Q2: Computing
a. Roughly how much memory do you need to store a human’s DNA: A memory stick, a computer hard drive or more?
b. In which decade were evolving computer viruses first conceived of?
c. Which of these are already used to develop software: mutation, reproduction, natural selection?
Q3: Astronomy
a. Which of these might have affected evolution on Earth: asteroids, supernovae, changes in the Sun’s brightness?
b. Where did the water for life on Earth come from?
c. When Betelgeuse (the red star in Orion) goes supernova, will it be bright enough to cause mass extinctions?
Q4: Physics
a. Does evolution violate the law that everything goes from order to disorder?
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b. Where does the positive entropy come from that cancels life’s negative entropy?
c. By what factor is this positive entropy bigger?
Answers
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Q1: Dinosaur evolution
a. Greek, meaning “terrible lizard”
b. Tyrannosaurus
c. Archaeopteryx
Q2: Computing
a. A memory stick
b. 1940s
c. All of them, in genetic programming
Q3: Astronomy
a. All of them
b. Comet impacts
c. No (it’ll be brighter than Venus but fainter than a full Moon)
Q4: Physics
a. No
b. The Sun (treating the Solar System as a closed system)
c. A trillion
By Stephen Serjeant (Head of Astronomy) and Jonathan Silvertown (Professor of Ecology) at the Open University. To try a short course visit: www.open.ac.uk/science/short