Science trivia separates the confident guessers from the people who actually paid attention in chemistry class. It plays just as well at a family game night as it does at a pub quiz.
Below are 70 science trivia questions split into six rounds: general science, biology, physics, chemistry, STEM, and astronomy. Every question comes with the answer and a short fact you can use to settle the argument that follows.
Run one round as a warm up, or play all six for a full quiz night. Difficulty is mixed inside each round, so kids and adults can compete at the same table.
General Science Trivia
Start broad. These 11 general science trivia questions jump between biology, chemistry, space, and the human body, so nobody gets shut out early. The round works well for middle schoolers and adults playing at the same table.
What is the study of plants called?
Answer: Botany.
Fun Fact: Botanists study how plants are built and how they work, then apply it to real problems like which crops survive a drought and which native species a restoration project should plant first.
How many phases does the moon go through per lunar cycle?
Answer: Eight.
Fun Fact: The moon always has one lit half and one dark half. What changes through the cycle is how much of the lit half points at Earth, which is why the shape looks different night to night.
What is the periodic symbol for Lanthanum?
Answer: La.
Fun Fact: Lanthanum goes into high-end camera and telescope glass because it bends light strongly without splitting it into colored fringes.
How many cloud to ground lightning flashes hit the lower 48 states in an average year?
Answer: About 20 million (1).
Fun Fact: A lightning channel heats the air around it to roughly 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, several times hotter than the surface of the sun. Florida records more of these flashes than any other state, especially the corridor between Tampa and Orlando.
What percentage of all animals are invertebrates (without a backbone or bony skeleton)?
Answer: 97 percent (2).
Fun Fact: That group runs from sponges to octopuses, and insects alone account for most of it. They handle the pollinating, the decomposing, and most of the feeding of everything higher up the food chain.
What is the smallest unit of matter?
Answer: An atom.
Fun Fact: An atom is mostly empty space. Its protons and neutrons sit in a tiny central nucleus, and the electrons circling it weigh about 1,800 times less.
What is the speed of light in a vacuum?
Answer: 299,792,458 meters per second.
Fun Fact: Nothing with mass can reach that speed and no signal can beat it, which is why distant events always arrive on a delay.
How many bones are in the human body?
Answer: 206.
Fun Fact: Babies start with around 300 bones. Many are separate pieces of cartilage that fuse as a child grows, which is how the count settles at 206.
Where do plants get energy from?
Answer: The sun.
Fun Fact: Photosynthesis turns sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into sugar. The plant burns that sugar to grow and releases the leftover oxygen, which is where most of the air you breathe comes from.
Who was the first woman in space in 1963?
Answer: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova.
Fun Fact: Tereshkova was 26 years old when she flew Vostok 6 and circled Earth 48 times, and she remains the only woman to have flown a solo space mission.
What is the word for cell division, where one cell divides into two identical cells?
Answer: Mitosis.
Fun Fact: Mitosis is how a cut heals and how a child grows. Each new cell carries a full copy of the DNA, so the replacement matches what it replaced.
Biology Trivia Questions
Round two covers the living world. These 12 biology trivia questions run from the smallest bone in your ear to the oldest tree on the planet, and most players will pick up a few without any help.
What is the oldest living thing on Earth?
Answer: The Great Basin bristlecone pine, a species of pine tree.
Fun Fact: Some of these trees were already centuries old when the pyramids went up, and the oldest are close to 5,000 years old. They survive by growing extremely slowly in thin, dry soil high on exposed mountain slopes.
What is the smallest bone in the human body called?
Answer: The stapes.
Fun Fact: The stapes is about 3 mm long, smaller than a grain of rice. It passes sound vibrations from the middle ear into the fluid of the inner ear, and hearing fails without it.
Where is the tibiofemoral joint found?
Answer: At the knee.
Fun Fact: The knee is the largest joint in the body and one of the most heavily loaded. It carries body weight while still rotating slightly, which is why it wears out before most other joints do.
What liquid attracts insects to flowers?
Answer: Nectar.
Fun Fact: Nectar is mostly sugar water, and it is the payment a plant makes for pollination. The insect gets fuel, the plant gets its pollen carried to another flower.
What continent does not have bees?
Answer: Antarctica.
Fun Fact: Antarctica is too cold and too dry for the flowering plants bees depend on, so its land animals are limited to a handful of tiny cold-hardy species such as mites and a wingless midge.
What is the smallest organ in the human body?
Answer: The pineal gland.
Fun Fact: The pineal gland is about the size of a grain of rice. It releases melatonin when light levels drop, which is the signal that starts the body winding down for sleep.
What is the largest organ in the human body?
Answer: Skin.
Fun Fact: Skin holds water in, keeps most microbes out, and manages body temperature through sweat and by widening or narrowing the blood vessels underneath it.
What is the process by which living organisms produce their offspring?
Answer: Reproduction.
Fun Fact: Reproduction splits into two camps. Asexual reproduction copies one parent exactly and is fast, while sexual reproduction mixes two sets of genes, which is slower but produces variety.
What is pyrogen?
Answer: A substance that causes a fever.
Fun Fact: Pyrogens tell the brain to raise the body temperature set point. The higher temperature slows some pathogens down and speeds parts of the immune response up, so a fever is usually working for you.
What is the most common blood type in the U.S.A.?
Answer: O-positive (3).
Fun Fact: O-positive is the type hospitals request most, simply because so many people have it. O-negative is the one paramedics reach for when there is no time to test, since almost any patient can receive it.
What is the common name for Ilex aquifolium, the prickly green plant with red berries?
Answer: Holly.
Fun Fact: Only female holly plants grow the red berries, and they need a male plant nearby to do it. Birds eat them happily, but they are toxic to people, dogs, and cats.
What part of the human body is in charge of coordinating the autonomic nervous system?
Answer: The hypothalamus.
Fun Fact: The hypothalamus is about the size of an almond and sits near the base of the brain. It runs temperature, thirst, hunger, and the sleep cycle with no conscious input from you.
Physics Trivia Questions
This round steps up in difficulty. The following 10 physics trivia questions suit teens and adults best, though a couple of them are fair game for a curious grade schooler.
What is the SI unit of force?
Answer: Newton.
Fun Fact: One newton is roughly the force it takes to hold a small apple up against gravity, which is a fitting scale for the man the unit is named after.
What is the name of the nearest known black hole, 1,500 light years away?
Answer: Gaia BH1.
Fun Fact: Gaia BH1 orbits an ordinary sun-like star, which is not where astronomers expected to find a black hole. It is a lightweight next to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, which carries about 4 million times the mass of the sun.
Does sound travel fastest in water or air?
Answer: Water.
Fun Fact: Sound moves about four times faster through water than through air because the molecules sit closer together and pass the vibration along sooner. It travels faster still through solid steel.
How long does it take sunlight to reach Earth?
Answer: 8.33 minutes.
Fun Fact: You always see the sun as it looked more than eight minutes ago. If it switched off right now, the sky would stay bright for another eight minutes.
What object did Albert Einstein’s father gift him that sparked his love of physics?
Answer: A compass.
Fun Fact: Einstein was about five when his father showed him the compass, and the idea that something invisible could swing the needle stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Who discovered the three laws of planetary motion?
Answer: Johannes Kepler.
Fun Fact: Kepler worked out that orbits are ellipses rather than circles, and that a planet speeds up as it swings closer to the sun. Mission planners still use those rules to plot satellite paths.
What is the law that states for every action, there is an equal opposite reaction?
Answer: Newton’s third law of motion.
Fun Fact: A rocket does not push against the air. It throws exhaust backward and the equal push forward is what lifts it, which is why rockets work in the vacuum of space.
What unit measures electrical power?
Answer: Watts.
Fun Fact: The watt is named after James Watt, the Scottish engineer whose separate condenser made steam engines far more efficient. One watt equals one joule of energy moved per second.
How many patents did the inventor Thomas Edison acquire?
Answer: 1,093.
Fun Fact: Those US patents cover electric light and power, the phonograph, and early motion pictures. Edison ran a full research lab at Menlo Park, so many of them were team efforts filed under his name.
What is the only natural satellite that orbits the Earth?
Answer: The moon.
Fun Fact: The moon raises the ocean tides and drags very slightly on Earth’s spin, which is why our days get a little longer over geological time.
Chemistry Trivia Questions
These 14 chemistry trivia questions range from straightforward symbol recall to a few that will stump most tables. Use them for a family game night, a classroom warm-up, or a pub quiz round.
What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Answer: Au.
Fun Fact: The symbol comes from aurum, the Latin word for gold. Gold is also one of the least reactive metals, which is why buried coins and jewelry come out of the ground still shining after thousands of years.
What is the hardest chemical in the human body?
Answer: Tooth enamel.
Fun Fact: Enamel is mostly hydroxyapatite, a crystal form of calcium phosphate. It is the hardest tissue the body makes and contains no living cells, so once it wears away the body cannot grow it back.
What is the chemical symbol for silver?
Answer: Ag.
Fun Fact: The symbol comes from argentum, the Latin word for silver. Silver also conducts heat and electricity better than any other element, which is why it turns up in solar panels and circuit contacts.
What is the term for a negatively charged ion?
Answer: Anion.
Fun Fact: An atom becomes an anion by gaining one or more electrons. The chloride in table salt is an anion, and it is part of why salt water carries an electric current.
What color is powdered lead carbonate?
Answer: White.
Fun Fact: White lead was the standard white paint pigment for centuries. The United States banned lead-based paint in housing in 1978 because of the damage lead does to a developing brain.
How many elements are on the periodic table?
Answer: 118.
Fun Fact: The table runs from hydrogen at number 1 to oganesson at 118. Most of the first 92 turn up naturally on Earth, while everything heavier has to be built in a lab, and the heaviest of those fall apart in a fraction of a second.
What is the most abundant element in Earth’s crust?
Answer: Oxygen (4).
Fun Fact: Oxygen and its compounds make up 49.2 percent of the crust by weight, almost all of it locked inside rock rather than floating free as gas. Hydrogen wins the title across the universe as a whole, but on Earth most of it is tied up in water.
True or false: you also have taste buds on your cheeks.
Answer: True.
Fun Fact: Taste buds also sit on the roof of the mouth and the upper throat. The tongue map you may have drawn in school, with sweet at the tip and bitter at the back, is a myth, since every region picks up every taste.
What color is liquid oxygen?
Answer: Blue.
Fun Fact: Liquid oxygen is a pale sky blue, and it is magnetic enough that a stream of it will hang between the poles of a strong magnet. Rockets carry it by the ton as an oxidizer.
What is the longer name for H2O2?
Answer: Hydrogen peroxide.
Fun Fact: Hydrogen peroxide is water with one extra oxygen atom, and that extra atom is what makes it reactive. It fizzes on a cut because an enzyme in your blood and skin tears it apart into water and oxygen gas.
Name the addictive substance that is used in tobacco products.
Answer: Nicotine.
Fun Fact: Nicotine reaches the brain within seconds of a puff and triggers a dopamine release, which is what makes the habit so hard to break. The tobacco plant makes it as a natural insecticide.
What is the chemical symbol for Americium?
Answer: Am.
Fun Fact: Americium does not occur in nature. A common smoke alarm holds a speck of it that ionizes the air inside a small chamber, and smoke drifting in disrupts that current and trips the alarm.
What is the chemical name for table salt?
Answer: Sodium chloride.
Fun Fact: On their own both halves are dangerous: sodium is a metal that reacts violently with water, and chlorine is a poisonous gas. Bonded together they become the salt your nerves and muscles need to fire.
What is the chemical symbol for iron?
Answer: Fe.
Fun Fact: The symbol comes from ferrum, the Latin word for iron. Iron is also what makes blood red, since it sits at the center of the hemoglobin molecule that ferries oxygen around your body.
STEM Trivia Questions
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These 11 STEM trivia questions lean toward computing, engineering, and math, so they suit a slightly older crowd.
When did Apple introduce the standard lightning cable?
Answer: 2012.
Fun Fact: Lightning replaced the wide 30 pin dock connector and introduced a plug that worked either way up. Apple has since moved its iPhone line over to USB-C.
What is the branch of civil engineering that focuses on engineering behaviors in Earth’s natural materials?
Answer: Geotechnical engineering.
Fun Fact: Geotechnical engineers decide what a structure can safely sit on. They test soil and rock before anyone pours a foundation, bores a tunnel, or builds a dam.
What is zero to the power of zero?
Answer: Undefined or one, depending on the mathematician you ask.
Fun Fact: Most programming languages return 1, because that convention keeps power series and counting formulas working. Mathematicians working with limits usually call it undefined instead.
Who is named the “father of computer science” and created the concept of the Turing machine?
Answer: Alan Turing.
Fun Fact: Turing described a simple imaginary machine that could compute anything computable, and that model still sits underneath every computer you own. He also led the Bletchley Park team that broke the German Enigma cipher.
Do you grow taller or smaller if you go into space?
Answer: Taller.
Fun Fact: With the spine unloaded in microgravity, the discs between the vertebrae expand and an astronaut can gain a couple of inches. The height comes back off within days of landing.
What is the pH of ammonia?
Answer: 11 to 13.
Fun Fact: That high pH is why ammonia cuts grease so well. Never mix it with bleach, because the two react to release toxic chloramine gas.
What is the name of SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation?
Answer: Starlink.
Fun Fact: Starlink satellites fly in low Earth orbit, only a few hundred miles up. That is far closer than the roughly 22,000 mile orbits older satellite internet used, which is why the signal delay dropped so sharply.
What is the abbreviation for Crystalline silicon?
Answer: c-Si.
Fun Fact: Crystalline silicon is the material in the large majority of solar panels sold today. It starts as purified sand, one of the cheapest raw materials on the planet.
What device is used to project objects far without a propellant?
Answer: Catapult or trebuchet.
Fun Fact: A trebuchet swings a heavy counterweight instead of storing energy in twisted rope, which let medieval crews throw far larger stones than a torsion catapult could manage.
What is the pseudonym of the mysterious person who created Bitcoin?
Answer: Satoshi Nakamoto.
Fun Fact: Nakamoto published the Bitcoin design in 2008, stayed active online for about two years, then went quiet. Nobody has confirmed who was behind the name.
Who discovered calculus alongside Gottfried Leibniz?
Answer: Isaac Newton.
Fun Fact: Newton and Leibniz worked it out separately, then spent years arguing over who got there first. The notation taught in school today is mostly Leibniz’s.
Astronomy Trivia Questions
The last round heads off the planet. These 12 astronomy trivia questions cover the solar system, stars, and the stranger corners of space. How many can your team get?
What star, besides the sun, is closest to the Earth?
Answer: Proxima Centauri.
Fun Fact: Proxima Centauri sits about 4.2 light years away and belongs to the Alpha Centauri system. It is a red dwarf, far too faint to spot without a telescope even though it is our nearest stellar neighbor.
How many tonnes of space dust lands on the Earth every day?
Answer: 14 (5).
Fun Fact: Most of it sheds off comets and asteroids and burns up long before it reaches the ground. Some of those grains carry carbon compounds, which is one reason researchers study whether space dust helped seed the chemistry of early life.
How far from Saturn does its ring system extend?
Answer: Up to about 175,000 miles (6).
Fun Fact: The rings are billions of chunks of ice and rock, and for all that width the main rings are only about 30 feet thick. The Cassini Division, the dark gap visible through a backyard telescope, measures 2,920 miles across.
What are storms caused by the sun called?
Answer: Solar storms.
Fun Fact: A strong solar storm shoves on Earth’s magnetic field, which lights up the auroras and can also scramble satellite signals, GPS accuracy, and power grids.
Which two planets don’t have a natural satellite?
Answer: Mercury and Venus.
Fun Fact: Both sit close enough to the sun that its gravity would strip away a captured moon or stop one from settling into a stable orbit. Saturn sits at the other extreme with more than 270 confirmed moons.
How long is Mercury’s year?
Answer: 88 days.
Fun Fact: Mercury spins once every 59 Earth days, but because it is also racing around the sun, a full day-night cycle there lasts 176 Earth days. A single Mercury day covers two Mercury years.
A little history question: what year was dark energy discovered?
Answer: 1998.
Fun Fact: Two competing teams found that the universe is not merely expanding but speeding up as it goes, and the result later earned a Nobel Prize. Dark energy accounts for roughly 68 percent of the universe, and nobody knows what it actually is.
In 1997, who was the first astronaut to vote from space?
Answer: David Wolf.
Fun Fact: Texas passed a law letting astronauts cast a secure electronic ballot from orbit. Most US astronauts live near Houston, so that one state law covers almost all of them.
What is the name of the largest moon in the solar system?
Answer: Ganymede.
Fun Fact: Ganymede is wider than the planet Mercury and is the only moon known to generate its own magnetic field. Researchers think it hides a salty ocean under its icy shell.
What is the name of the stars formed when big stars run out of fuel and collapse?
Answer: Neutron stars.
Fun Fact: A neutron star crams more mass than the sun into a ball roughly the width of a city. A sugar cube of that material would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
What group of people invented astrology in the year 1000 BCE?
Answer: Assyro-Babylonians.
Fun Fact: Babylonian sky watchers tracked the planets to time floods and harvests, and their record keeping fed straight into early astronomy. The two fields only parted ways for good in the 1600s.
Europa is a moon that orbits which planet?
Answer: Jupiter.
Fun Fact: Under Europa’s ice sits a saltwater ocean thought to hold more water than every ocean on Earth combined. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission was built to survey it up close.
FAQs
Who Is Known As the Father of Science?
Galileo Galilei is the scientist most often called the father of modern science, a title Albert Einstein credited to him. Born in Italy in 1564, Galileo improved the newly invented refracting telescope and used it to spot Jupiter’s four largest moons, record sunspots, and track the phases of Venus. Those observations supported the idea that Earth orbits the sun.
Why Does the Periodic Table Keep Growing?
The heavy end of the table does not sit around waiting to be found, so it has to be made. Physicists fire a beam of lighter nuclei at a heavy target inside a particle accelerator, and once in a great while two of them fuse into a single heavier atom that survives a fraction of a second before falling apart. Row seven was finished in 2016 with nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson. Teams in Japan, Russia, and the United States are now aiming at element 119, which would open a new row. IUPAC checks each claim first, then the discovering team proposes a name, usually after a place, a mineral, or a scientist.
Could a Nearby Black Hole Ever Be a Danger to Earth?
No known black hole is close enough to matter. The nearest one, Gaia BH1, sits about 1,500 light years away, and gravity drops off fast with distance. A black hole also does not vacuum up whatever drifts past it. It pulls exactly as hard as any other object of the same mass, so if the sun were swapped for a black hole of equal weight, Earth would hold its current orbit and simply go dark and cold. The missing sunlight would be the problem, not the black hole.
What Are Good Science Trivia Questions for Kids?
Good science trivia for kids sticks to things a child can picture: how many bones are in the body, where plants get their energy, which planet has rings. Skip questions that hang on one memorized number. The general science and biology rounds above suit elementary and middle school players, while the physics and STEM rounds work better for teens.
How Do You Run a Science Trivia Night?
Run a science trivia night in rounds of 10 to 12 questions with a short break between each one. Put people in small teams so quieter guests still contribute, read every question twice, and collect written answers so nobody can shout over the table. Slipping one easy question into every three harder ones keeps the teams that fall behind still playing.
What Are Some Questions Science Still Hasn’t Answered?
Science still has no settled answer for what dark matter and dark energy are made of, how consciousness arises in the brain, or whether life exists anywhere beyond Earth. Other open questions include:
- What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?
- Are humans alone in the universe?
- What is the fundamental nature of consciousness?
- What lies beyond a black hole?
- What is the fate of the universe?
- How can we cure cancer?
- How many species are on Earth?
- Is the universe infinite?
- Why do we dream?
- What is at the bottom of the ocean?
A few of these may be settled within a generation. Others, consciousness in particular, have shrugged off every approach tried so far.
