Chemistry World Christmas quiz, day 6
Posted by Patrick on Mon 10 Dec 2012Categories: Christmas , Uncategorized | 1 Comment
And on the sixth day of Christmas my true love brought to me, six geese a-laying topical chemistry questions. 
Right, I hope you’ve rested your brain over the weekends and you’re ready for more. Off we go.
Chemists had some stern words for Auntie Beeb (the BBC) and James May of Top Gear fame in September. Why?
In August, Nasa’s rover Curiosity landed on the red planet and started making measurements with many different instruments. What type of instruments can be found in ChemCam?
On to the answers from yesterday’s quiz questions
The elements that a Southampton PhD student was poisoned with were arsenic and thallium. Investigations are still ongoing. You can read our story here.
GFAJ-1 stood for Give Felisa A Job. Felisa Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the original Science paper that made the claim that bacteria isolated from Mono Lake in California could metabolise arsenic. You can read more about the arsenic life story here, here, here and here.
Mon 10 Dec 2012 at 1:01 pm
1. This one really got to me. Something’s aired on TV, one would expect the broadcasting company to have proof-read it atleast twice! It was outright disrespectful to the scientific community in general, and chemistry in particular. To answer the question, wrong chemical formulae for the simplest of molecules.
2. The only thing that comes to my mind right now is the APXS (alpha particle x-ray spectrometer)