General Awareness · Science General

Inventors and Scientific Discoveries

4,616 Questions

This hub provides questions related to great inventors and their scientific discoveries. It covers the inventors of the telephone, radio, and microchips, alongside Nobel Prize winners. These facts are crucial for the general awareness section of major competitive exams.

Famous inventionsNobel Prize winnersScientific conceptsKey inventors

Inventors and Scientific Discoveries Questions

Multiple choice
  1. Kohler & Milestein

  2. Kary Mullis

  3. William Bateson

  4. Eva Engvall and Peter Perlman

  5. Robert Joseph Dole

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
B Correct answer
Explanation

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was developed in 1983 by Kary Mullis. It is a biochemical technology to amplify a single or a few copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude generating thousands to millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence.

Multiple choice
  1. Peter Agre

  2. Robert Brown

  3. Martin Chalfie, Osamu Shimomura, and Roger Y. Tsien

  4. Alec Jeffreys

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
C Correct answer
Explanation

Martin Chalfie, Osamu Shimomura, and Roger Y. Tsien were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on 10 October 2008 for their discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein.

Multiple choice
  1. Netscape

  2. Microsoft

  3. Sun

  4. None of the above is correct

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
C Correct answer
Explanation

Java was invented by Sun Microsystems in 1995 under the leadership of James Gosling. The language was originally called 'Oak' and was developed for consumer electronics, later repurposed for web applications. Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010, which now maintains Java.

Multiple choice
  1. Netscape

  2. Microsoft

  3. Sun

  4. None of the above is correct

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
C Correct answer
Explanation

Java was invented by Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle). James Gosling led the Java project at Sun in the early 1990s. Netscape developed JavaScript (not Java). Microsoft created .NET and C#, not Java. The correct answer is Sun.

Multiple choice
  1. Richard Feynman

  2. Norio Taniguchi

  3. K. Eric Drexler

  4. Gerd Binnig

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
B Correct answer
Explanation

Norio Taniguchi was a professor of Tokyo University of Science. He coined the term nanotechnology in 1974, to describe semiconductor processes such as thin film deposition and ion beam milling exhibiting characteristic control on the order of a nanometer.

Multiple choice
  1. Electron microscope

  2. Stroboscope

  3. Atomic force microscope

  4. Scanning tunneling microscope

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
D Correct answer
Explanation

The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981, provided unprecedented visualization of individual atoms and bonds, and was successfully used to manipulate individual atoms in 1989. The microscope's developers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.

Multiple choice
  1. Eric Drexler

  2. Robert Curl

  3. Richard Feynman

  4. Harry Kroto

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
C Correct answer
Explanation

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. The talk is considered to be a seminal event in the history of nanotechnology, as it inspired the conceptual beginnings of the field decades later.

Multiple choice
  1. Landsteiner

  2. A. S. Wiener and Landsteiner

  3. De Castello and Steini

  4. Bernstein

  5. None of these

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
C Correct answer
Explanation

De Castello and Steini discovered the fourth blood group AB.