John was so frustrated to be the suspect of being a sleeper terrorist that he shoot himself right between the eyes with a revolver in his toilet. The revolver and the bullets were accurate. Minutes later John walks out of the toilet unharmed.
How can this be possible?
You were playing ping pong with your friend. Suddenly the ball fell into a narrow metal pipe that was imbedded in the concrete surface of the floor one foot deep. Now you don't have any other ball and you desperately want to take it out and play. You and your friend have your shoelaces, your tennis paddle and a plastic water bottle. However, the bottle cannot fit into the pipe.
You have two strings whose only known property is that when you light one end of either string it takes exactly one hour to burn. The rate at which the strings will burn is completely random and each string is different.
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.
