If I put in one canary per cage, I have one bird too many. If I put in two canaries per cage, I have one cage too many. How many cages and canaries do I have?
Its something that each of us devours,
Not just us but birds, beats, trees, and flowers,
Frets iron and nibbles steel,
Toil hard stones to meal,
Exterminates king, collapse town,
And blows the mountains down.
A deaf and mute man goes to the train station. Tickets for the train are 50 cents each. The man goes to the ticket booth and hands the man inside just a dollar. The man in the booth hands him two tickets.
How did the man in the booth know to give him two tickets without even looking at him?
One day Jenifer meets the Lion and the Tiger in the Forest of Forgetfulness. She knows that the Lion lies on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and tells the truth on the other days of the week. The Tiger, on the other hand, lies on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, but tells the truth on the other days of the week. Now they make the following statements to Jenifer:
In the addition below, all digits have been replaced by letters. Equal letters represent equal digits and different letters represent different digits.
ABCABA
BBDCAA
ABEABB
ABDBAA
------- +
AAFGBDH
What does the complete addition look like in digits?
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.