The Globe’s 2022 science quiz is five galaxies worth of fun

a. A black and white image of Stephan’s Quintet appears at the very beginning of the film when the “angels” are talking to one another. If you compare that to the Webb telescope photo you can see how far astronomers have come in 76 years.

c. Dr. Schmitt received his PhD in geology from Harvard University in 1964. He was the only member of a cohort of scientist-astronauts that NASA trained as part of the Apollo program to actually get the chance to be on a lunar mission.

d. Together with IBM researcher Charles Bennett, Dr. Brassard is known for coming up with quantum key distribution, a way of sending encrypted information that is eavesdrop-proof.

d. That’s right. Scientists at the University of Alberta, together with U.S. colleagues, had three chances to name a mineral found in an African meteorite after the fictional ore of Marvel comics fame. Did they do it? They did not. Boo scientists. Boooooo!

c. The island, located near the port of Canso, was almost exactly on the path of the storm’s centre line. As Fiona passed over it, the pressure recorded at a weather station there dipped to 932.7 millibars.

b. The recorded water level of 2.82 metres (nine feet, three inches) shattered the previous high-water mark.

b. Based on satellite images, the plume from the eruption on Jan. 15 reached an altitude of 58 kilometres. That’s more than halfway to space!

b. With the help of underwater robots, the storied shipwreck ship was located on March 5, 2022, by the Endurance22 expedition.

a. Dubbed Nun cho ga (big animal baby) by members of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation, the mummified mammoth is thought to have been about one month old when it was submerged in the mud near a prehistoric riverbank.

c. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the population of the migratory monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) has shrunk by between 22 per cent and 72 per cent over the past decade. (If you answered snowbird you may be taking the U.S. exchange rate a bit too personally.)

d. Based on fossils unearthed in China, an international team of scientists concluded that early dinosaurs were living in polar regions and well adapted to Arctic conditions at the beginning of the Triassic era. When cold weather spread during a series of global volcanic eruptions, they were able to supplant earlier reptiles who needed warmer weather to survive.

b. In other words, Canada has a long way to go to get to “30 by 30.”

c. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel reported that they built a “fish operated vehicle” (FOV) capable of responding to the movements of a goldfish swimming inside a tank on a wheeled platform. Fish learned to successfully navigate to targets they could see through the tank.

d. As documented in a study published this year, scientists in Australia, Canada and the United States observed octopuses deliberately throwing shells and debris at other octopuses.

b. The conclusion is based on a Harvard University study using two decades of health data from 10 million U.S. military personnel.

b. Dr. Cullis developed the lipid nanoparticle envelope that contains the messenger RNA and allows it to enter human cells and ultimately trigger an immune response to the coronavirus.

d. That’s about the same amount of time it took for the population to double from two billion (in 1927) to four billion (in 1974). The doubling before that, from one to two billion, took more than a century.

c. In a study published in January, archaeologists from the Royal Ontario Museum documented botanical remains that suggest hallucinogenics from the vilca tree may have been added to beer during ritual feasts as a political strategy.

d. In the Canadian-Israeli study, an AI-guided technique identified small bits of flint that had been heated by fire at a site where animals had been butchered by Homo erectus. While there is good evidence for fire associated with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens by 200,000 ago, evidence has recently started emerging for the much earlier use of fire by members of the genus Homo.

c. But all of the algorithms mentioned here made a splash in 2022, which will likely go down in history as the year that “generative AI” officially arrived. It should be noted that an algorithm capable of generating The Globe and Mail science quiz remains out of reach at present.