Here are the questions. The answers can be found at the bottom of this page, but don鈥檛 scroll down until you鈥檝e given them a good go.听听
1. Uncle Johannes has outdone himself this year, serving up an eight-course Christmas feast (though some of the dishes are a little unusual). In order, the first seven courses are: mousse, vol-au-vents, eggnog, milkshake, jelly, soup and upside-down cake. What might the final course be?
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2. This entity can be found travelling at near the speed of light under the Swiss-French border. Change one letter and you get the name of something it turns into. What are these two things?
3. What does this code, which might be delivered to you upon opening your front door, represent? (Hint: 262 usually appears in the middle.)
587 / 523 494 523 587 494 523 / 494 440 494 523 440 494 / 440 392 440 494 392 440 / 392 370 392 440 370 392 / 370 330 349 392 330 370 / 330 294
4. After the frontal lobe makes a call and the limbic system sends a signal, 15 facial muscles contract, including the zygomaticus major. The muscles between the ribs spasm, forcing air out of the lungs. Speech may become strained and reach a higher pitch than normal. Tears may emerge. But there is no reason to be alarmed. Why?
5. All three of the following describe different objects that share a name, and all might be seen during December 鈥� at least in the northern hemisphere. What is the name?
鈼� A mixture including emulsified vitellus, crystalline sucrose, alcohol and acid
鈼� A sphere of compacted crystalline dihydrogen monoxide
鈼� A hemisphere of aerated sucrose and gelatine, encased in a layer of particles dispersed in a crystallised fat matrix, and coated in desiccated drupe shavings
6. What, logically, could come next in this sequence? Elementary particles in the standard model (pre-2012); horns on a trio of triceratops; nucleotide bases in RNA.
7. Although used as a metaphor for a rare event, this phenomenon has occurred on several occasions when the atmospheric conditions have been right. In fact, it is due to happen next on 31 May 2026. What is this it?
8. The following terms all have something in common. What is it?
鈼� Uranium oxide powder
鈼� The playful inspiration for a code name given to a mystery radio signal in 1967
鈼� Random motion of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid
鈼� The change in wavelength of an approaching celestial object
9. See if you can get this one in a snap. These significant figures describe spectacular moments in history:
1827: 0 km; 1946: 105 km; 1968: ~400,000 km; 1990: ~6,000,000,000 km
The same thing happened each time. What is it, and what do the numbers represent?
10. Fill in the blank: With this, you lend an ear / With this, there is nothing to hear / With this, your tree can raise a grin / Tellurium, lithium, 鈥�
11. A land snail native to Fiji takes the first part of its name (the genus) from an area in which it resides: the Mba, or Ba, district. Malacologist Alan Solem gave in to an 鈥渋rresistible impulse鈥� when giving it its second (species) name. What is the land snail鈥檚 full name?
12. All together now: what do you get if you combine the total number of Platonic solids, an element used extensively in communication and decoration, and faraway structures shepherded by Prometheus and Pan?
ANSWERS
1. The courses share their initials with the planets of the solar system, in order, moving out from the sun. So any dish beginning with "n" would fit the bill 鈥� anyone for a naan?
2. Proton and photon. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN smashes together protons and the ATLAS experiment examines the debris, which includes photons.
3. Take a deep breath鈥� This is each of the 33 notes of "Gloria", as sung in Ding Dong Merrily on High, expressed in hertz according to the , where 262 Hz is middle C. (NB: These have been rounded to the nearest whole number.) You might get a rousing rendition after opening the door to carol singers.
4. Ho ho ho, sounds like someone's just told a joke. This is what is happening inside your body when you hear a good rib-tickler and start to laugh.
5. Each of these describes a different type of "snowball": the first is the advocaat-based cocktail, the second is the kind that you might hurl on a snowy day and the third is the marshmallowy, chocolatey, coconutty confection.
6. There were 16 elementary particles in the standard model before the discovery of the Higgs boson, three triceratops would have a total of nine horns and there are four nucleotide bases in RNA 鈥� cytosine, guanine, adenine and uracil. These are square numbers in descending order, so next in the sequence would be something there is only one of, such as protons in a hydrogen atom.
7. A blue moon. The traditional definition of a blue moon is The moon has also appeared blue in colour after volcanic eruptions and forest fires.
8. They all include a colour. In order: yellowcake; little green men (abbreviated to LGM by pulsar discoverer Jocelyn Bell Burnell in the 1967 code name); Brownian motion; blueshift.
9. These numbers represent when famous photographs were taken of Earth and from what distance. We have, in order: the oldest surviving photograph taken by a camera obscura (so strictly, a picture of just a bit of Earth); the , by a 35-millimetre film camera on a V-2 rocket; the Earthrise shot snapped from the moon's orbit in Apollo 8; and the , from far beyond the orbit of Neptune.
10. Tin. The first three lines describe words that are anagrams of each other: listen, silent and tinsel. The chemical symbols for the elements in the final line, when pushed together, form yet another anagram of the previous three words. So we have Te for tellurium, Li for lithium and Sn for tin.
11. If you said "Ba humbug", that's close enough. This particular snail is named .
12. Five gold rings. There are five Platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron); gold is used in communication (as a key component in computers and mobile devices) and as decoration (in jewellery); and the shepherd moons Prometheus and Pan maintain the rings of Saturn by their gravitational influence.
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