Science Quiz

I was listening a recent podcast of BBC Radio 4's "Now" show (hilarious recap of the week's event) and they were commenting on the story that UK students aren't that good at science. They asked three questions and gave funny answers, so if you didn't know the answers (as I didn't to 2 of them), you have to look them up.

1) What are the five characteristics shared by all animals?
2) What is a benzene ring?
3) What is Brownian motion?

Answers :
1) http://www.coolschool.ca/lor/BI11/unit10/U10L01.htm
2) http://www.thefreedictionary.com/benzene+ring
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

Probably only interesting to me...

In church today, the pastor started off the sermon with some story about his friends in Southern California and the weather and the temperature. He then said the weather there was around 20 degrees Centigrade. I cocked my head, puzzled. Centigrade? I'd always heard it called Celsius. So then I wondered - what's the difference?

Dan Berger, MadSci Adminstrator, writes :
The difference between degrees Celsius and degrees centigrade is that one is the name of the person who invented the scale (in which water freezes at 0° and boils at 100°), and the other describes the scale ("centigrade" means "100 divisions"). ... Because we call the Fahrenheit scale after its inventor, to be consistent we should refer to the Celsius scale after its inventor.