FST written by me wrote: The intent of a design pattern named for one of these structures is to decouple an abstraction from its implementation, and, unlike the adapter pattern, is usually designed up front. Some of these structures that stabilize protein structures are usually formed with glutamic acid or aspartic acid as the acid and arginine or lysine as the base. It’s not hills, but Lutz and Reid observed swarms of the ant species E. hamatum exhibiting collective intelligence by building living types of these structures. The catenary formed by free (*) cables is deformed into a parabola when the cables are attached to the deck in one kind of these structures. Another type of these structures is used to connect the half-cells of an electrochemical cell. For 10 points, name these structures that come in cantilever, arch, and suspension types.
ANSWER: bridges [accept salt bridges; accept suspension bridges]
2014 NASAT wrote: The size of particles that can be carried by a river is proportional to this power of the flow velocity. The deuterated version of DMSO has this many deuterium atoms, and the DnaB helicase in eukaryotes is an oligomer with this many subunits. A common nonpolar solvent is a mixture of isomers of the alkane containing this many carbons. In transition metal chemistry, fac-mer isomerism occurs in complexes containing this many ligands, which have d-orbitals split into t sub 2g and e sub g levels. In the first step of glycolysis, this position of glucose is phosphorylated by glucokinase, and glucose, fructose, and galactose all have this many carbons. For 10 points, give this number, which is also the number of ligands in an octahedral complex and the atomic number of carbon.
ANSWER: six [or 6]
I'm interested in what everyone's opinions are of these types of questions. Is transitioning between sciences too jarring (for the lack of a better word)? Since they are often in the Other Science subdistro, do they take away too much from under-asked about topics?2017 ACF Fall wrote: Vertically aligned nanotube arrays have been used to produce the most intense known form of this color. The Lyman absorption forest is formed by lines of this color emitted by quasars. This color describes objects that can be approximated by a cavity in a hole and have an emissivity of one. This is the color of spectral absorption lines, as well as the background of an emission spectrum. The Rayleigh-Jeans law describes radiation from bodies named for this color. Gravitational collapse can form an object named for this color, which has a Schwarzschild radius that marks its event horizon. For 10 points, name this color that names “holes” from which not even light can escape.
ANSWER: black [prompt on no color or equivalents]
I will say that one of the reasons I wrote the above TU on bridge was to clue some interesting topics like design patterns and ant bridges while also making the question convertable and enjoyable for players by cluing from other bridges. Looking back, I'm not sure it was a good idea. I guess what I want to ask is: do you think these questions systemically trend towards poor construction based off of one or two clues rather than challenging players' knowledge across different science categories? Is there space for these types of questions if they are tightly controlled with very few per tournament and only cluing between two fields, or should they be avoided completely?