Science
Five real newspaper headlines about science, printed between 1859 and 2020, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.
There are 5 rounds of five in this topic, and a new one appears whenever the archive has enough for it.
Headline one
The Athenaeum
1859
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859, presenting his theory of evolution by natural selection. The entire first print run of 1,250 copies sold out on publication day. The book overturned prevailing views on creation and sparked fierce controversy with the Church, most famously at the 1860 Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
Headline two
The New York Times
1942
Enrico Fermi and his team at the University of Chicago achieved the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction beneath the stands of Stagg Field stadium on 2 December 1942. The experiment, codenamed Chicago Pile-1, was a crucial step in the Manhattan Project. The achievement demonstrated that nuclear fission could be controlled and paved the way for both nuclear weapons and power generation.
Headline three
The Washington Post
1977
NASA launched Voyager 1 on 5 September 1977, on a trajectory to fly past Jupiter and Saturn and eventually leave the solar system. The spacecraft became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, confirmed in 2012. It carried the famous Golden Record, a collection of sounds and images intended to communicate the story of Earth to any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it.
Headline four
The Guardian
2000
US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair jointly announced on 26 June 2000 that a working draft of the human genome had been completed by the publicly funded Human Genome Project and rival private company Celera Genomics. The mapping of the approximately 3 billion base pairs of human DNA was hailed as one of the greatest scientific achievements in history. The complete sequence was published in 2003.
Headline five
The Times
2020
On 2 December 2020 the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use, following authorisation by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. The first vaccinations began on 8 December, with 90-year-old Margaret Keenan making history as the first person in the world to receive the approved vaccine outside a clinical trial. The rollout marked a pivotal moment in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
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