Your last good ping-pong ball fell into a narrow metal pipe embedded one foot deep in concrete.
How can you get it out undamaged, if all the tools you have are your tennis paddle, shoe laces, and plastic water bottle, which does not fit into the pipe?
After teaching his class all about Roman numerals (X = 10, IX=9 and so on) the teacher asked his class to draw a single continuous line and turn IX into 6. The teacher's only stipulation was that the pen could not be lifted from the paper until the line was complete.
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.
