Mixed Quiz Bowl Practice

The Milgram obedience experiment

(often just called the "Milgram experiment") was carried out at Yale University by psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram was inspired to conduct the experiment by the high-profile trial of Adolf Eichmann, who claimed the Nazis carrying out the Holocaust did it because they were merely "following orders." In Milgram's experiment, the subject was led to believe they were administering electric shocks to a "learner" (who was assisting in running the experiment) to punish the learner for making mistakes. Subjects were ordered to increase the voltage to dangerously high levels as the experiment continued, as the learner screamed in pain and pleaded with them to stop; if they stopped to question whether the experiment was safe, they were told to continue. Over 60 percent of participants eventually administered shocks so powerful that they would have killed the learner had they been real.

Henry (William Sydney Porter)

- Cabbages and Kings - The Four Million - The Gift of the Magi, - The Ransom of Red Chief

James Watson and Francis Crick

1962 for discovering the molecular structure of DNA. They published the well-known double-helix structure based on "Photo 51," an X-ray diffraction image of DNA produced by Rosalind Franklin. Because Franklin died in 1958 (the Nobel committee does not award prizes posthumously), Francis and Crick instead shared the prize with Maurice Wilkins, a colleague of Franklin who provided them with the diffraction data. The pair also determined, with the help of Chargaff's rules, that the base pairs of adenine-thymine and cytosine-guanine were structurally similar within the DNA molecule.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

A Catholic American author who wrote in the "Southern Gothic" style. In her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Bailey takes his family on a vacation; when they stop at a diner, "the grandmother" talks with the owner Red Sammy about The Misfit, an escaped murderer. After the cat Patty Sing causes the family's car to crash into a ditch, a group of men led by the Misfit murder the family, including the grandmother, who claims The Misfit is one of her own children before he shoots her three times. In "Good Country People," Hulga has her prosthetic leg taken by Manley Pointer, a nihilistic atheist Bible salesman. O'Connor also wrote "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in which Julian rides on a newly-integrated bus with his mother.

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

A French author who frequently used ironic endings in his stories, including "The Necklace." In that story, Mathilde Loisel borrows the expensive-looking title piece of jewelry from Madame Forestier, and loses it at a high-class party. In order to afford a 36,000 francs replacement, she and her husband sell everything they own. Ten years later, Madame Forestier recognizes Mathilde on the street and informs her that the necklace was a fake. In "Boule de Suif," translated into English as "Ball of Fat," the title character is a prostitute who is on a carriage leaving Prussian-occupied Rouen. The travelers are detained by the Prussians until Boule de Suif sleeps with an officer, for which she is judged for the remainder of the trip even though her fellow passengers pressured her to do so.

J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)

An American author best known for the novel The Catcher in the Rye. Many of Salinger's short stories featured the Glass family, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which Seymour and Muriel Glass are on vacation at a Florida resort. Seymour meets a young girl named Sybil Carpenter and talks with her about the title creatures, before returning to his hotel room and shooting himself. In "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," the narrator Sergeant X replies to a wedding invitation with two distinct memories; in the first, he meets Esmé, an English orphan, during a church choir practice, and in the second, set during his time as a soldier in Bavaria, he receives a letter containing a wristwatch from Esmé. Both of those stories are included in Salinger's collection Nine Stories.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

An American author known for his science fiction works. "There Will Come Soft Rains," which appears in his collection The Martian Chronicles and takes its title from a Sara Teasdale poem, describes an empty house that survived a nuclear catastrophe. The house is fully automated and continues to operate even though the family is dead, a fact demonstrated by their silhouettes permanently burned on the side of the house. In his story "A Sound of Thunder," Eckels steps on a butterfly while hunting a T. Rex on a time-travel safari, which changes the future timeline so that the fascist Deutscher wins an election.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

An American author known for his works in the detective fiction, science fiction, and horror genres. In "The Cask of Amontillado," the narrator, Montresor, lures Fortunato into catacombs with the promise of the title wine, but ends up chaining Fortunato to a wall and burying him alive due to unnamed "insults." Poe also wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which an unnamed narrator murders an old man with a "vulture-eye" and buries him beneath his floorboards. However, while being questioned by police, the guilty narrator hears the constant beating of his victim's heart, and orders them to "tear up the planks" to reveal the body. Other short stories by Poe include "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Ernest Hemingway

An American author many of whose stories feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams. Adams appears in "Big Two-Hearted River," in which he goes on a fishing trip to the town of Seney, Michigan. In "Hills Like White Elephants," a woman named Jig talks with a man at a train station, considering an unnamed "procedure," which is implied to be an abortion. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" begins with the description of a frozen leopard carcass; its protagonist, Harry, is a writer who dies of gangrene while on an African safari with his wife Helen. Hemingway also apocryphally wrote a six-word story consisting of the words "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

An American author whose stories are often set in New England. In "The Minister's Black Veil," Hawthorne wrote about Reverend Hopper, who stubbornly refuses to take off the title article of clothing. Hawthorne also wrote "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," in which the title character shows off water from the Fountain of Youth. Both of those stories are included in his collection Twice-Told Tales. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," the title character is Beatrice, the child of a scientist who grows poisonous plants, who herself becomes poisonous. After Giovanni falls in love with Beatrice, he brings her an antidote so they can be together, but, instead of curing her, the antidote kills Beatrice. That story appears alongside "The Birth-Mark" and "Young Goodman Brown" in the collection Mosses from an Old Manse.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)

An American short story author and novelist known for her works in the mystery and horror genres. Her most famous short story is "The Lottery," whose publication in The New Yorker was extremely controversial, garnering her hate mail. The story begins with village children gathering stones, foreshadowing the end result of the title event. Mr. Summers tells all of the village families to draw slips of paper from a black box, and Bill Hutchinson's has a black spot. The entire Hutchinson family then has to draw, and Tessie receives the black spot, meaning she has "won" the title event. The story ends with her yelling "It isn't fair" as the townspeople stone her to death.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

An Argentine author known for his philosophical stories. In "The Library of Babel," the narrator's universe is made of adjacent hexagonal rooms, forming a library containing all possible 410-page books consisting of 25 basic characters. Another story by Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths," is framed as a manuscript written by Doctor Yu Tsun, a World War I spy, who is pursued by Richard Madden. He realizes that the title labyrinth is actually an unfinished novel, and eventually shoots Stephen Albert to communicate the location of a British artillery park. Those two stories appear along with "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Borges's collection Ficciones. Borges also wrote "The Aleph," whose title location contains all other points in space.

Fantasia

Walt Disney animated film consisting of eight animated story segments overlaid with classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Fantasia's soundtrack, which includes Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and The Rite of Spring, was the first to be produced in stereoscopic sound (i.e., "in stereo"). The marquee segment of Fantasia is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Mickey Mouse magically summons a horde of dancing brooms in the castle of the wizard Yen Sid ("Disney" spelled backwards). A portion of Fantasia in which a black centaur buffs the hooves of a white centaur was edited out in 1969 before the film's re-release. A sequel, Fantasia 2000, was released in 1999.

Feldspars

a group of silicate minerals that are the most abundant minerals in the Earth's crust. Feldspars are categorized based on whether they contain potassium (orthoclase) or sodium and calcium (plagioclase). The continuous branch of Bowen's reaction series covers the transition from calcium-rich to sodium-rich plagioclases. Orthoclase defines hardness 6 on the Mohs scale.

Sandstone

clastic sedimentary rock, which means it is composed of pre-existing fragments of other rocks and minerals (usually quartz and feldspar). Common subgroups of sandstone include arkose (sandstones containing over 25% feldspar), wackes (sandstones with a large amount of clay between mineral grains), and arenites (sandstones with a small amount of clay between mineral grains). Fine-grained sandstones make good aquifers because they are porous enough to allow percolation of water but still filter out pollutants.

Granite

common igneous rock. Granite is felsic, meaning it is primarily composed of feldspar and quartz, and intrusive, meaning it crystallizes and solidifies underground. Granite can experience large-scale weathering, leading to the formation of structures like Yosemite National Park's Half Dome.

Barbara McClintock

described the existence of transposons, also called "jumping genes," from her observations that certain DNA sequences on the maize she was studying could change position on a chromosome. While studying generations of maize at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she hypothesized that these "controlling elements" were regulatory in nature, and that their motion around the genome could be the driving factor behind how two identical genetic sequences can exert different functions. McClintock is the only non-shared female recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Citizen Kane

directed by Orson Welles, is considered by many (including the American Film Institute) to be the greatest film ever made. Through flashbacks, it tells the story of fictional publishing mogul Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles and loosely based on real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst), who buys the <>New York Inquirer, unsuccessfully runs for governor of New York, and tries to make his second wife an opera star before dying at his Florida estate, Xanadu. In the present day, reporter Jerry Thompson fruitlessly attempts to discover the meaning of Kane's dying word, "Rosebud," which turns out to be the brand name of Kane's beloved childhood sled, an object burned by unsuspecting servants as the film ends.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

discovered the basic mechanisms of genetic inheritance via his experiments on fruit flies, specifically the species Drosophila melanogaster. By conducting a series of experiments in his renowned "Fly Room" at Columbia University, Morgan and his students tracked mutations, noting how various traits were inherited across successive generations of the flies. His data supported the idea of genetic linkage by noting that the probability of two genes being inherited together correlates inversely with their physical distance on a given chromosome, leading Morgan to postulate the mechanism of crossing over. Because of his work, the unit centimorgan is now used to measure the physical distance between genes.

12 Angry Men

explores themes of morals, justice, and doubt as it follows the deliberations of a jury over the guilt of an 18-year-old defendant on a charge of patricide. Deliberations initially stall when Juror 8, played by Henry Fonda, is the only one to vote "not guilty"; a series of secret ballots and conversations gradually erode the jury's certainty, and they ultimately vote to acquit. The last holdout, Juror 3, played by Lee Cobb, is implied to be locked into his "guilty" vote because of his anger over his poor relationship with his own son. The film, directed by Sidney Lumet, lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Bridge on the River Kwai.

Micas

group of silicate minerals known for their perfect basal cleavage, meaning they can easily split into thin, parallel sheets. Common varieties of mica include black biotite and transparent muscovite. Mica is often found in igneous rocks called pegmatites and also serves as the main constituent of the metamorphic rock schist. Micas generally have a Mohs hardness between 3 and 4.

It's a Wonderful Life

is a Christmas drama produced and directed by Frank Capra based on Philip Van Doren Stern's short story "The Greatest Gift." Set in the fictional town of Bedford Falls, It's a Wonderful Life stars Jimmy Stewart as building and loan operator George Bailey, who plans to commit suicide on Christmas Eve over a financial disaster caused by the villainous Henry Potter. A guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (played by Henry Travers), stops George from killing himself by showing him what his hometown would be like had he never been born: for example, George would not have been able to save his younger brother from drowning in a frozen lake, or prevent the town pharmacist from accidentally poisoning a prescription.

Ben-Hur

is a historical epic from MGM Studios that stars Charlton Heston as the title prince of Jerusalem who is unjustly imprisoned on the flagship of Roman general Quintus Arrius after tiles falling from his roof nearly kill the governor of Judea. Ben-Hur features a massive, nine-minute-long chariot race in which Heston's character defeats Messala, played by Stephen Boyd. The film's score, composed by Miklós Rózsa, is the longest ever composed for a feature film. Ben-Hur's eleven Oscars was a record that stood until Titanic (1997). More than 200 camels were used in the film, which was adapted from Lew Wallace's novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

North by Northwest

is a thriller from director Alfred Hitchcock starring Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive framed for the murder of U.N. diplomat Lester Townsend. In one memorable and oft-parodied scene, Thornhill is chased through a field near Chicago by a crop duster airplane. At the film's climax, Thornhill and Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint) are chased by spies led by Phillip Vandamm across the top of Mount Rushmore. North by Northwest features a MacGuffin (an object common in Hitchcock films—something desired by characters yet ultimately meaningless to the story) in the form of microfilm containing government secrets that is hidden inside a sculpture.

Rashomon

is an Akira Kurosawa film based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa's 1922 short story "In a Grove" (not his story "Rashomon"). The film depicts a trial in which a bandit (Tajomaru), a woodcutter (Kikori), a samurai (through a medium), and the samurai's wife recount the events that led to the samurai's death. A common thread through the four stories is the presence of an expensive dagger no longer at the crime scene. The marked differences in the characters' stories, however, led to the term "Rashomon effect" to describe the unreliability of eyewitnesses. During the woodcutter's testimony, the group is interrupted by the cries of an abandoned baby, a crisis that reveals some insights into the characters

The Wizard of Oz

is an MGM adaptation of L. Frank Baum's children's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The cast includes Frank Morgan as the title wizard, Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West, and Judy Garland as the protagonist, Dorothy Gale, who, with her dog Toto, is whisked from Kansas to the mystical land of Oz by a tornado. The Wizard of Oz was one of the first films to use three-strip Technicolor, although the credits and the framing sequences set in Kansas were filmed in sepia-toned black-and-white. The film won two Oscars, including Best Original Song for "Over the Rainbow," but lost the Best Picture award to Gone With the Wind.

Gone With the Wind

is an adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel of the same name. The film was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming, who had just directed The Wizard of Oz. Gone With the Wind is set during the Civil War on the Georgia plantation of Tara and stars Vivien Leigh in an Oscar-winning role as Scarlett O'Hara, who marries Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) despite pining after the married Ashley Wilkes. Near the end of the film, Scarlett suffers a miscarriage after a fight with Rhett, who then leaves her; when Scarlett asks him, "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" he famously responds "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Karl Landsteiner

known as the "father of transfusions," made important discoveries in the field of serology in the early 1900s, including the identification of the three major blood groups (A, B, and O). He determined that mixing blood from two individuals with incompatible blood types can lead to a dangerous form of blood clumping called agglutination. In 1937 (after he received the Nobel), he also identified the Rh factor (the "plus" or "minus" in one's blood type) in the blood of the rhesus monkey, a discovery which further increased the safety of blood transfusions. While studying in Vienna in 1908, Landsteiner isolated the polio virus, providing the basis for Jonas Salk's vaccine against the disease.

Alexander Fleming

made the accidental discovery of the antibiotic penicillin after haphazardly stacking Petri dishes in the corner of his notoriously untidy laboratory. He noticed that one culture of the Staphylococcus that he was studying had developed a fungus that destroyed all the nearby colonies of bacteria. After developing the mold in a culture of its own, he discovered that it produced a "mold juice," later called penicillin, that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. Although Fleming originally believed penicillin to be too slow-acting to have any positive therapeutic effect, it formed the basis for beta-lactam antibiotics, which are still effective in many medical cases today.

Quartz

mineral composed of Si O4 tetrahedra linked in a framework with oxygen atoms shared between neighboring tetrahedra to give an overall chemical formula of Si O2 (silicon dioxide). Inclusions of different elements give different varieties of quartz, including amethyst (purple). Quartz is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth's crust. Quartz is often used in clocks because it exhibits piezoelectricity. Quartz defines hardness 7 on the Mohs scale.

Corundum

mineral composed of aluminum oxide. Common gem forms of corundum include rubies (turned red by inclusions of chromium) and sapphires (which can take a variety of colors from inclusions of iron, titanium, or vanadium). Corundum defines hardness 9 on the Mohs scale.

Diamond

mineral composed of carbon atoms in a "diamond cubic" crystal structure. Among natural materials, diamond has one of the highest thermal conductivities and highest hardnesses; it defines hardness 10 on the Mohs scale. Natural diamonds are almost always found in igneous rocks called kimberlites.

Basalt

most common igneous rock—over 90% of volcanic rocks on Earth are basalt! Basalt is mafic, meaning it is rich in magnesium and iron, and extrusive, meaning it cools and solidifies on the Earth's surface. Lava containing gas bubbles may cool into vesicular basalt. Basalt primarily composed of vesicles is known as scoria.

Ivan Pavlov

performed detailed research on the process of digestion, which he published in 1897 in The Work of the Digestive System. By surgically exposing selective sections of a dog's digestive system, Pavlov was able to study in detail how material moves through the stomach and intestines; he identified the timing of various gastric and pancreatic secretions. While he won the Nobel purely for his contributions to physiology, he's more well-known for performing the first psychological studies of classical conditioning. After observing the behavior of dogs upon repeatedly bringing them food, Pavlov noticed that the dogs would begin to salivate prior to food even arriving, providing the basis for the concepts of a conditioned response and conditioned stimulus.

Paul Ehrlich

performed early work in the field of immunology. He discovered that, after exposing mice to a small dose of ricin and gradually increasing the dose given, the animals developed an immunity to it. In addition to his Nobel-winning work, he also postulated the concept of a "magic bullet," a compound that could be used to selectively target and eliminate agents of disease. He made his own "magic bullet" in 1909 when he discovered that the compound arsphenamine (now called Salvarsan) could be used as an effective cure for syphilis. In the early phase of his career, Ehrlich developed a close friendship with Robert Koch after presenting him with an improved technique for staining bacteria, which would become the precursor to the technique of Gram staining.

Willem Einthoven

performed groundbreaking work related to electrocardiography. He invented a device called the string galvanometer to measure the electric current of the heart, which until then had been impossible without applying electrodes directly to the heart. This galvanometer would form the basis of the modern ECG (EKG) machine. His method of assigning three leads on human limbs, forming an inverted equilateral triangle centered on the heart, is still used in EKGs today, and is known as Einthoven's triangle. He also assigned the letters 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', and 'T' to the various deflections seen on an EKG; that notation, which describes the familiar QRS complex pattern, is also still used today.

Robert Koch

pioneered the field of modern bacteriology, and established his theory of four postulates that must be satisfied in order to determine that a disease is caused by a particular microbe. He used these postulates to discover the bacterial agent that causes tuberculosis, contradicting the popular opinion that the disease was inherited. Koch also determined the causative agents of cholera and anthrax and examined the concept of acquired immunity while on exhibition in German New Guinea.

Limestone

sedimentary rock primarily composed of calcium carbonate. Limestone often metamorphoses into marble. Because limestone is made from carbonate minerals, it is soluble in acid, and erosion of limestone can form karst topography. Limestone is commonly used in the production of lime and cement and as a pH buffer in soil conditioners. Sandstone is a clastic sedimentary rock, which means it is composed of pre-exi

Calcite

stable mineral form of calcium carbonate. Less stable forms of calcium carbonate (called polymorphs), such as aragonite, eventually convert to calcite. Calcite is found in the shells of many marine organisms, including plankton, echinoderms, and bivalves. This makes calcite a major constituent of sedimentary rocks, especially limestone. Many optical devices utilize calcite because it exhibits birefringence (double refraction). Calcite defines hardness 3 on the Mohs scale.

Casablanca

stars Humphrey Bogart as American expatriate Rick Blaine living in Vichy-controlled Morocco during World War II. The film opens with Ugarte, a local criminal, attempting to sell "letters of transit" at Rick's nightclub, Rick's Café Américain. Ingrid Bergman stars opposite Bogart as Rick's former lover Ilsa Lund, whose current husband, an anti-Nazi resistance leader, needs the letters. In one memorable scene, Ilsa's husband, Victor Laszlo, leads a crowd in singing "La Marseillaise" in response to a group of Nazis singing "Die Wacht am Rhein." Famous quotes from Casablanca include "Round up the usual suspects," "Here's looking at you, kid," and "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Clark doll experiment

studied the perception of race in children. Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark were a married team of psychologists and the first African Americans to receive doctorates in psychology at Columbia University. In a series of studies, they presented children across the country—from all races—with dolls that were identical except for skin color and hairstyle. They then asked the children to identify the "nice doll," the "bad doll," and other questions involving subjective judgments. The results of the study indicated that children of all races showed a preference for the white doll, indicating that racism in American society created an inherent sense of inferiority in Black children even by the age of five. The Clark's research was cited by the Supreme Court in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education ordering the desegregation of schools.

The Skinner box

was an apparatus developed by psychologist B. F. Skinner during his time as a graduate student at Harvard to explore the effects of operant conditioning, in which a behavior may be increased or decreased through the use of reinforcement or punishment, respectively. The design of the Skinner box is similar to the puzzle box developed earlier by Edward Thorndike. The most basic Skinner box consists of a small chamber, into which an animal is introduced, and a lever (or button, or other apparatus), which Skinner called a "manipulandum." The manipulandum can deliver food, turn off an electrified floor, or in some other way affect the environment inside the box positively or negatively. The animal's interaction with the lever allows researchers to observe changes in behavior in response to repeated reinforcements or punishments.

The Bobo doll experiment

was carried out by Albert Bandura at Stanford University, who wanted to study the effect of watching an adult model on the behavior of children. Children in the experiment observed an adult interacting with a "Bobo doll," a large self-righting toy designed to look like a clown. In some cases, the adult either completely ignored the doll; in other cases, the adult was highly aggressive toward the doll, to the extent of throwing it, hitting it with a mallet, and yelling at it. Bandura found that children who observed an adult acting aggressively toward the doll were far more likely to act aggressively towards the doll themselves, as compared to children who watched a model ignoring the doll. The experiment provided support for the idea of social learning theory, which holds that behaviors may be learned by observing models

The original Small-World experiment

was carried out by Stanley Milgram (who also carried out the obedience experiment) to examine the interconnectedness of Americans. Milgram mailed a number of people in Nebraska and Kansas a package, and asked them to send it to a target in Boston. If they knew the individual in Boston, they could send it directly to the target; if they did not, they were instructed to send it to a personal acquaintance who they believed would be most likely to know the person in Boston. This process continued until the package reached the final person in Boston. The experiment showed that, of the packages that did make their way to Boston, they typically did so in five or six steps, leading to the coining of the phrase "six degrees of separation." The experiment was an important early study of social networks.

The Little Albert experiment

was carried out by psychologist John Watson, with assistance from Rosalie Rayner, to test if it was possible to intentionally condition fear in an otherwise normal child. Watson initially exposed an infant test subject (identified by the pseudonym "Albert") to numerous white, fluffy stimuli, such as a rat, a rabbit, and wool; the infant displayed no fear of these items. Watson then began to expose the infant to a white rat, while banging a bar with a hammer to create a loud, scary noise whenever the infant interacted with the rat. Eventually, Albert began to react with distress when exposed to any white fluffy stimuli, including a Santa Claus mask. The experiment has been heavily criticized on both ethical grounds (for the infliction of trauma on an infant) and on procedural grounds (as one child identified as potentially being "Little Albert" may have been born with serious cognitive impairment).

The first Asch conformity experiment

was designed and run by Solomon Asch at Swarthmore College in an attempt to see whether individuals would conform to the thinking of a group of peers in a situation in which the group was clearly wrong. Participants in the experiment were paired with seven other people—all of whom were in on the plan. The groups were shown a "base" line, then were shown three other lines, and were asked to pick which of the three other lines was the same length as the "base" line. On pre-planned trials, the seven confederates each intentionally picked a line that was clearly a different length than the "base" line. In nearly 40 percent of these trials, the subject of the experiment also gave an incorrect answer, likely to conform with the answer provided by the others.

The Stanford prison experiment

was designed by Philip Zimbardo to study the effects of power dynamics in custodial situations. Participants—college students at Stanford University—were randomly assigned to be "guards" or "prisoners" for a two-week period; the guards were instructed to refer to the prisoners only by their number, not their name. Although the experience was designed to be structured, by the second day prisoners had begun to rebel against the guards, and guards (including one nicknamed "John Wayne") began to implement sadistic practices designed to degrade, humiliate, and dehumanize inmates. The experiment was stopped after only six days when Christina Maslach, a psychology graduate student, raised ethical objections. Zimbardo later analyzed the experiment in a book which compared the events of the Stanford prison to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Many aspects of the experiment and its legitimacy have been questioned or disputed by contemporary researchers and experiment participants.

Ronald Ross

was the first British recipient of the Nobel Prize, recognized for his work related to the transmission of malaria. While studying in India, he dissected a mosquito of the species Anopheles (which he termed "dappled-winged" due to its strange posture), and discovered the presence of the malarial parasite (from the genus Plasmodium). He then used birds to demonstrate that the parasite is stored in the salivary gland of mosquitoes and is released when a host is bitten. Ross received the Nobel prize individually in 1902, after fellow bacteriologist Robert Koch voiced his support for him over Italian scientist Giovanni Battista Grassi, who had reported similar findings on the malaria lifecycle.

Martin Seligman's learned helplessness experiments

were instrumental in identifying that individuals who believe they are powerless to stop a harmful stimulus will eventually stop trying to avoid it at all. Seligman divided a number of dogs into three groups: one group which received no electric shocks, one group that received electric shocks but could stop them by pressing a lever, and one group which was led to believe they had no control over when the shocks stopped or started. Each group of dogs was then placed into a new situation where they were given shocks but presented an easy means of escape. While the first two groups of dogs each quickly escaped from the shocks, the third group—those given no control over the initial shocks—made no attempt at escape. The experiment had major implications for the understanding and treatment of clinical depression via therapy.