A spaceship was lost. The detective was given a piece of paper. This was the location of the spaceship! This is what the slip had scribbled on it:
Juice, Umbrella, Potato, Ice, Tomato, Elephant, Rice.
I drive at an average speed of 30 miles per hour to the railroad station each morning and catch my train. On a particular morning, there was a lot of traffic and at the halfway point, I had averaged only 15 miles per hour. How fast must I drive for the rest of the way to catch my train?
A boy was at a carnival and went to a booth where a man said to the boy, "If I write your exact weight on this piece of paper then you have to give me $50, but if I cannot, I will pay you $50." The boy looked around and saw no scale so he agrees, thinking no matter what the carny writes he'll just say he weighs more or less. In the end the boy ended up paying the man $50. How did the man win the bet?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.