Joy to the Whorled! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Leonardo da Vinci

In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds, Surgeon-Superintendent of Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo, Japan, wrote an article for "Nature" magazine, in which he discussed his observations about fingerprints and a way to obtain them using printers' ink. He sent findings to Charles Darwin, who passed them on to his cousin, Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist. Galton sought to use fingerprints to determine an individual's heredity and race. Although he found no such link, in 1888 he did prove that fingerprints do not change over the course of one's life, and that no two fingerprints are the same (more or less). Then in 1891, Juan Vucetich, an Argentine police officer, created the first fingerprint files based on Galton's system. With these he matched a bloody print to a Mrs. Rojas, who was consequently convicted of murdering her two sons.

Renaissance figure Leonardo da Vinci invented or at least thought of a great many things, including helicopters, but fingerprinting was not among them!

Answer: Carl Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus is the father of modern botany and one of Sweden's most famous sons. He loved plants even as a child, but he became interested in their scientific whilst he was in medical school, where he found the contemporary botanical classification system to be woefully inadequate.

He created the binomial system, consisting of genus and species, still in use in the 21st century for all living things.

Answer: squid

Squid and octopuses are mollusks, specifically cephalopods, but they have no shells. It is thought that the chambered nautilus of today is most like the primitive mollusks of the Cambrian period. Many modern gastropods, including snails, also have whorled shells. Whether spiral or bivalve, the shells are made of calcium carbonate, or chalk.

The shiny inside of bivalve mollusk shells is called mother-of-pearl. Paleontologists have used ancient mollusk shells to determine the climate of prehistoric times.

Answer: No

A.J.S. Klar performed a study in 2003 which the scientist believed demonstrated that left-handed people tend to have counter-clockwise whorls. Klar also observed in a 2004 study on a beach near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a higher proportion of counter-clockwise whorls in gay men.

Other scientists, however, have not been able to replicate these findings. It's not even clear which genes determine hair whorls and their direction. So it's just a myth, alas.

Answer: the Pinwheel Galaxy

Also known as NGC 5457, the Pinwheel Galaxy is about 170,000 light-years in diameter, twice as big as the Milky Way. As it is about 25 million light-years away from us, in the constellation Ursa Major, what we see is actually how it appeared 25 million years ago, when mastodons roamed the Earth! This photo is the most detailed of any spiral galaxy taken by Hubble. Large regions of star-forming nebulae dot the arms of M101.

Pierre Méchain discovered it in 1781, but Charles Messier gets the credit because he was compiling the "Messier Catalogue" of astronomical objects at the time.

Answer: It makes cytokines.

Hassall's corpuscles are also called thymic corpuscles. You will find these spherical bodies in the medulla of the human thymus, an important organ in the immune system. They are named after British physician and chemist Arthur Hill Hassall (1817-1894), but he didn't know exactly what they did - and apart from being (a redundant) one of several sources of cytokines, their physiological function was still unknown in the early 2010s. Hassall was also known for his work in food purity which led directly to the 1860 Food Adulteration Act in the UK.

Answer: James Watson and Francis Crick

Many historians of science believe that UK chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin should have shared in the glory the discovery. In fact, Watson and Crick used some of Franklin's unpublished data without her permission. Alas, she died in 1958, years before Watson and Crick received their Nobel Prize in 1962.

If you uncoil all the DNA in a human being, it would reach from the Earth to the moon and back some six thousand times!

Answer: Neolithic Period

Sometimes the simplest tools do the best work. The whorl is a weight that uses principles of momentum and gravity to increase or maintain the rotating speed of a spindle, which may be simply a rounded, tapering wooden rod. The higher the whorl sits near the shaft, the faster the spindle will spin. A whorl could be made of ceramic or stone, or even glass, oak, bone, limestone, amber, slate, or lead, or any heavy, local material.

It is often difficult to study the history of domestic technology because so many of the products of "women's work" are perishable: textiles disintegrate, food is eaten, etc. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of science sometimes have to draw inferences based on the "hard" technology they find (like spindle whorls, loom weights, and pottery) and on artistic depictions of home life. Excavated women's graves in ancient Scandinavia contain spindle whorls and other implements of their work in life.

Answer: False

Many snakes, including rattlesnakes, pit vipers, and cobras, will tend to strike from a coiled position, but they can actually strike from any position. If you grab a snake's tail, it can turn rather quickly and bite your hand or arm.

Most snake species are in fact non-venomous, but all are obligate carnivores and all lack external ears or eyelids.

Answer: Slinky

"Everyone knows it's Slinky!" Richard James, a naval engineer, invented this "marvelous thing" in 1943. Or rather, he discovered it, when he knocked a compressed helical spring off a shelf and noticed its arcing movement. Through experimentation with the tension and properties of steel, he perfected the "walk", and his wife Betty graced Slinky with its name. (In fact, she took over and expanded the company after the two divorced in 1964.) The original Slinky was plain metal; later versions were plastic and colored.

More than a toy, it has been used in science classes by teachers and in physics experiments by NASA. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania declared the Slinky to be its official state toy in 2002.