Test your brain on these mind-bending scientific riddles
(1) You have been invited to sit at the periodic table. Among these mythological figures, and the elements that bear their names, are the 12 titans (titanium), Prometheus (promethium) and Thor (thorium). Nobel Prize winners and their element namesakes include Ernest Rutherford (rutherfordium), Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie (curium) and Albert Einstein (einsteinium). The “noble types” are the noble gases, which are found on the far right of the periodic table.
(2) The word on the card is Noel (or, more precisely, NOeL). N is the symbol for newtons, O is the most common blood group, e is a mathematical constant and L. on specimen labels indicates that Carl Linnaeus named a species.
(3) Element 47 has been used throughout the ages. It creates images in several ways: silver salts are used in photography and silver itself is used in mirrors. Silver ions or compounds are included in dressings because of their antimicrobial properties. Silverware provides calories in the form of knives, forks and spoons, and if you have shiny glass baubles on your Christmas tree, that shine may be due to a thin layer of silver inside.
(4) Why, it is the Carole of the bells. In order, these describe astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, physicist John Stewart Bell, and inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
(5) Gingerbread would be an acceptable answer. Our dishes share their first two letters with the most commonly used metric prefixes (words that make a number larger or smaller by powers of 10) regularly going from tiny (nano) to massive (giga). In order, they are: nano (10-9), microphone (10-6), milli(10-3), a break of 100 (which is equivalent to 1), kilo (103), mega (106) and giga (109).
(6) These describe Ada Lovelace, Mary Anning, Hannah Fry and Mitochondrial Eve. Mary Anning is the only one who does not have a palindromic first name, that is to say one which is read the same way forwards and backwards (or backwards), so it is she who will not return next year.
(7) Add the energy symbol, E, and an energy unit symbol, eV (the electronvolt), to Mendel to get Mendeleev. Gregor Mendel demonstrated how traits are inherited in a series of breeding experiments on pea plants in the 1850s and 1860s, while Dmitri Mendeleev created the first periodic table by arranging chemical elements in order of atomic weight.
(8) The three clues describe Makemake, murmur and meme. Each of these words is made up of a repeated unit that shortens by one letter each time, so the year MM (2000 in Roman numerals) could logically follow.
(9) The Christmas pudding has been set on fire! Cognac must be warmed before pouring over it, so that the ethanol vapor from the alcohol burns off, not the pud.
(10) The theme of Grandma’s charades was music. The clues refer to classical, rock, pop and finally punk and emo.
(11) It’s cheese. Humans have been making cheese in one form or another for over 7,000 years. It gets its flavor and texture from the many varieties of bacteria, molds and yeasts that live there.
(12) The answer is crazy. Each clue describes a word that contains the word “nut”: sternutation, coypu, minute, nutrition. You might find them in your stocking or maybe on the table after dinner.
