The Globe’s 2021 science quiz is like a booster for your brain – no appointment required

a. The message, devised by Ian Clark, a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, appears in binary code in the red and white pattern of the parachute.

b. The crash is expected to slightly alter the orbit of the tiny body around another, larger asteroid, providing an important test for future efforts to defend Earth against wayward space rocks.

a. The experimental result, obtained at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, could indicate the presence of a new force of nature – or it could be a statistical fluke.

c. Musk has indicated in the past that he will take a trip aboard his own Dragon capsule one day, but some speculate he is holding out in order to participate in a flight of historic significance.

d. The Cumbre Vieja eruption began on Sept. 19 this year, nearly 50 years after a different volcanic vent named Teneguia erupted at the southern tip of the island on Oct. 26, 1971.

b. People working at Alert – Canada’s northernmost inhabited location – managed to witness the eclipse through broken cloud cover.

b. Based on remote sensing data, the southeastern Amazon basin, which makes up about 20 per cent of the total rain forest, has become a net source of atmospheric carbon owing to deforestation.

c. About one-10th of the atmospheric CO2 humans are responsible for has been emitted since the Paris Agreement and more than half since climate change was first identified as a problem by scientists in 1979.

c. The last confirmed sighting of the woodpecker occurred in Louisiana in 1944.

c. Most of the species spent more time near highways, which got quieter during the pandemic. Red-tailed hawks may have done the opposite because there was less roadkill to supplement their diets.

d. Changes in isotope levels measured along the length of the tusk reveal where the mammoth was grazing. It is estimated to have walked about 70,000 kilometres – almost double Earth’s circumference – in its 28-year lifespan.

b. Branching patterns found in the sedimentary rock closely resembled fossilized sponge tissue.

a. After several setbacks, the pair demonstrated that an extract taken from the pancreas of one dog could be used to lower the blood sugar of another dog, prompting the famous rooftop photo with canine #408.

b. David Julius, a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, used capsaicin, which gives chili peppers their heat, in his prize-winning study of human pain receptors.

c) Researchers a the Georgia Institute of Technology found that fingers rotate at the equivalent of 7,800 degrees a second during a snap and accelerate 2.6 times faster than record-setting baseball pitches. Eye blinks are no match for this. TV watchers rushing to start the next episode of Succession may choose to argue the point.

b. The study found that a small subset of dogs, called “gifted word learners,” were best at learning the names of objects that they were asked to retrieve and also more likely to tilt their heads. The researchers postulate that the gesture may have something to do with the lateral processing of human vocalizations.

b. Scientists were able to use isotopes generated by cosmic rays to date the tree rings in scraps of wood that the Vikings left behind at the L’Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland. This allowed them to figure out the year the wood was cut. Remarkably, it turned out to be exactly one thousand years ago.

d. The footprints, discovered on the surface of an ancient lakeshore, were left between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago – pushing back the arrival of humans to the continent by at least 5,000 years.

b. The terms could also be interpreted as “nectar” and “servant” and they may have made up part of a person’s name.

This is a pottery fragment dating to ~1450 BC with an early example of the alphabet.

The find from Tel Lachish fills an important gap in the history of the alphabet as it spread into the Levant.

🔗 (🆓) https://t.co/gZsNP93C8j pic.twitter.com/XeQDJ320Ag

— 🅰ntiquity Journal (@AntiquityJ) June 1, 2021

d. Are you surprised?