Question: What cell line used in research that was taken from an African-American woman who died in 1951 is the oldest and most commonly used human cell line?
Answer: HeLa cell line

Question: What type of creature was Lonesome George, who died in 2012 and who gained fame as the rarest creature in the world? (hint: he was aged perhaps more than 100 years)
Answer: (Pinta Island) tortoise

Question: A 15 meter long mechanical arm called the Canadarm was used to maneuver payloads through the 1980s to 2011 on what type of vehicles?
Answer: Space shuttles

Question: 'Martha' - 1914 - Cincinnati Zoo - passenger pigeon. 'Benjamin' - 1936 - Hobart Zoo - ?.
Answer: Thylacine/ Tasmanian tiger

Question: The epitaph of which 20th century physics great reads a hazy and ambiguous "He lies somewhere here"?
Answer: Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

Question: Renal calculus is not a branch of mathematics but a fancy name for what painful affliction?
Answer: Kidney stone

Question: The famed oil drop experiment performed by Millikan and Fletcher in 1909 helped determine what fundamental physical constant?
Answer: Charge of an electron

Question: Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania with its high levels of diversity that includes chimpanzee populations is best associated with which person?
Answer: Jane Goodall

Question: Troglobites whose characteristics are a heightened sense of hearing, touch and smell are organisms that primarily live in what environments?
Answer: Caves or dark places

Question: In June 1696 Bernoulli addressed a letter to the mathematicians of Europe challenging them to solve two problems concerning curves. Several people including Leibniz sent solutions. Whose solution was submitted anonymously but was recognized by Bernoulli with the words "tanquam ex ungue leonem" (we know the lion by his claw)?
Answer: Isaac Newton's

Question: The Alvarez hypothesis named after the father-and-son team of scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez claims that an asteroid hitting the Earth sixty-five million years ago is the cause for what?
Answer: Extinction of dinosaurs and other living things

Question: What critter paired with the butterfly in the title of a 2007 movie is the only species of spider known to live entirely under water?
Answer: Diving bell (or) water spider

Question: Similar to an eclipse, they are among the rarest predictable celestial phenomena. The last one for the 21st century occurred on 5/6 June 2012. They are historically of great scientific importance as they were used to gain the first realistic estimates of the size of the Solar System. Observation for the first time in 1639 provided an accurate estimate of the distance between the Sun and the Earth. Answer?
Answer: Transits of Venus

Question: The most recognized form of a jellyfish and a basic stage in its life cycle takes the name of what fearsome monster in mythology? (hint: stone!)
Answer: Medusa

Question: A 2000s British musical by Mat Fraser whose plot is about the love affair of a guy with phocomelia (a birth defect that causes stunted limbs) is titled after what drug?
Answer: Thalidomide

Question: Fill in the missing word in this sentence written by Arthur Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World (1927). The law that ___ always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.
Answer: Entropy

Question: The spacecraft New Horizons which is expected to be the first spacecraft to flyby Pluto (in 2015) contains on board whose ashes as a tribute?
Answer: Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto

Question: The Goldbach's conjecture, one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics, states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as a sum of what?
Answer: Two prime numbers

Question: What systems are classified based on their visual appearance by the Hubble sequence?
Answer: Galaxies

Question: The 1957 B2FH paper, named after the initials of the scientists that wrote it, is the source of Carl Sagan's famous quote "We are all ___ stuff." What is the missing word?
Answer: """Star"""

Question: What was the collective name given to the 17 macaques that became known for their use in experiments into neuroplasticity (the ability of the adult primate brain to reorganize itself) and whose life became the focus of significant animal rights activism in the US in the 1980s?
Answer: Silver Spring monkeys

Question: What long-held belief that takes its name from the Greek for 'pollution' purported that deadly diseases like cholera and plague were caused by a noxious form of 'bad air'?
Answer: Miasma theory

Question: The only penguin species that lives north of the equator are found on and named for what islands? (hint: evolution)
Answer: Galapagos (the Galapagos penguin)

Question: The development of the immuno-suppressant drug ciclosporin in the 1980s gave a fillip to what type of surgeries?
Answer: Organ transplants

Question: What was the subject of astronomer Fred Whipple's 'Dirty Snowball' hypothesis?
Answer: Comets

Question: In physics, what is the more common term for the Einstein-Rosen bridge that has fascinating implications for time travel?
Answer: Wormhole

Question: When Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discovered pulsars in 1967, they were baffled by the unnatural regularity of the radio transmissions. Jocularly suggesting that it was the work of extraterrestrials, they initially named their discovery as LGM-1 which expands to what?
Answer: 'Little Green Men 1'

Question: """It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you."" Who is the 20th century scientist who is describing his most famous experiment in the above words?"
Answer: Ernest Rutherford

Question: In 2010, Andre Geim became the first person to receive both the Nobel Prize and what other unusual prize whose ceremony closes with "If you didn't win a prize - and especially if you did - better luck next year!"?
Answer: Ig Nobel Prizes

Question: What type of testing has traditionally been classified into 4 categories of atmospheric, underground, exo-atmospheric and underwater?
Answer: Nuclear weapon testing

Question: On 24 July 1969, the aircraft carrier USS Hornet retrieved which pioneers from the Pacific Ocean about 400 miles off Wake Island?
Answer: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronauts from their splashdown

Question: The Montreal Protocol that went into force in 1989 and which was hailed by Kofi Annan as "... the single most successful international agreement to date ..." was aimed at protecting what?
Answer: Ozone layer

Question: """I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life. And looking at them it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy."" Who is the pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that said the above words?"
Answer: Frank Drake, of the namesake Drake equation

Question: The terms anadromous and catadromous describe what type of living thing referring to its mode of migration? (hint: 'ana' is up and 'cata' is down in Greek)
Answer: Fish

Question: What's the missing word in this paraphrase of Stephen Hawking's statement that the universe has not existed forever? "It's true because if it were not, all things would be the same ___."
Answer: """temperature"""

Question: In 2010, when the British scientist Robert Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, a Vatican official called it "completely out of order" and said that the award ignored ethical questions. What was Edwards recognized for? (hint: not cloning)
Answer: IVF (in vitro fertilization)

Question: In 1891, where did the Dutchman Eugène Dubois discover a specimen of Homo erectus which at the time was the oldest hominid ever found?
Answer: Java (thus Java Man)