Olympiad Test Level 2: Scientific and Technological Development and Inventions

Beijerinck, Martinus was a Dutch microbiologist who was the first person to use the term "virus". He originated selective culture techniques, also known as enrichment culturing, and was the first to isolate a wide range of microorganisms.

Louis Essen FRS O.B.E. was an English physicist whose most notable achievements were in the precise measurement of time and the determination of the speed of light. He was a critic of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, particularly as it related to time dilation.

Anatoly Yakovlevich Solovyev is a retired Russian and Soviet cosmonaut and pilot. Solovyev holds the world record on the number of spacewalks performed (16), and accumulated time spent spacewalking (over 82 hours).

Meteor Crater formed 50,000 years ago when an asteroid plunged through the Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into what would become central Arizona. Meteor Crater is also known as Barringer Crater after the first person to correctly suggest it was formed by a large meteorite impact.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. It was lifted into orbit by the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. It is the most complex and sensitive space observatory ever constructed, and it has become astronomers' principal tool for exploring the universe.

Modem allows home computers to connect to the internet.

• WWW stands for World Wide Web.
• It is a system of interconnected documents accessed through the internet.
• The world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee.
• The world wide web was invented in 1989.
• World wide web information service was launched in India on 14^th June 1995.
• A webpage is a page consisting of information on the world wide web.

P. Hargobind Khurana: Khorana was the first scientist to chemically synthesize oligonucleotides. This achievement, in the 1970s, was also the world's first synthetic gene; in later years, the process has become widespread. Subsequent scientists referred to his research while advancing genome editing with the CRISPR/Cas9 system.
Q. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam: Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was an Indian aerospace scientist who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied physics and aerospace engineering.
R. Aryabhata: Aryabhatta is the father of Indian mathematics. He was a great mathematician and astronomer of ancient India. His major work is known as Aryabhatiya.
S. Vikram Sarabhai: Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped develop nuclear power in India.

• Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection. His most famous work, On the Origin of Species, explains the theory of evolution by natural selection, providing numerous supporting examples. 
• The theory proposes that the fittest individual organisms, those with the characteristics best suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce.

In physics, a newton (N) is the metric unit of force. It was named after Sir Isaac Newton. One newton is equal to 1 kilogram meter per second squared. In plain English, 1 newton of force is the force required to accelerate an object with a mass of 1 kilogram 1 meter per second per second.

• A comet's nucleus is like a dirty snowball made of ice, gas and dust. As the comet gets closer to the Sun, some of the ice starts to melt and boil off, along with particles of dust. These particles and gases make a cloud around the nucleus, called a coma. 
• The coma is lit by the Sun. The sunlight also pushes this material into the beautiful brightly lit tail of the comet.

• Joseph Priestley was hugely productive in research and widely notorious in philosophy. He invented carbonated water and the rubber eraser, identified a dozen key chemical compounds, and wrote an important early paper about electricity. 
• He found that air is not an elementary substance, but a composition, or mixture, of gases. The world recalls Priestley best as the man who discovered oxygen, the active ingredient in our planet's atmosphere.

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits or passes in front of, the star.

Google announced ‘Pie’ as the name for the latest version of the Android operating system, succeeding Android Oreo. The Android P or ‘Pie’ version has begun rolling out to Pixel phones and will be available to other devices later this year.

• The instrument used to measure the intensity of the earthquake is known as Seismograph.
• A speedometer is an instrument that indicates the speed of a vehicle.
• A Barometer instrument is used to measure atmospheric pressure.