There are two dice with empty faces in front of you and a marker. You can mark any number on each of the faces of the two dice, but you have to display all 31 days of the month using the two of them.
Which numbers will you mark on which dice so that you can easily depict all the dates of the month?
A swan sits at the center of a perfectly circular lake. At an edge of the lake stands a ravenous monster waiting to devour the swan. The monster can not enter the water, but it will run around the circumference of the lake to try to catch the swan as soon as it reaches the shore. The monster moves at 4 times the speed of the swan, and it will always move in the direction along the shore that brings it closer to the swan the quickest. Both the swan and the the monster can change directions in an instant.
The swan knows that if it can reach the lake's shore without the monster right on top of it, it can instantly escape into the surrounding forest.
A man is found unconscious in front of a store at two in the morning. His head is bleeding and there’s a brick laying next to him. When the police arrive, they carry the man to jail. Why did they arrest him?
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.