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.
What 8 letter word can have a letter taken away and it still makes a word. Take another letter away and it still makes a word. Keep on doing that until you have one letter left. What is the word?
When Jack was six years old he hammered a nail into his favourite tree to mark his height. Ten years later at age sixteen, Jack returned to see how much higher the nail was. If the tree grew by five centimetres each year, how much higher would the nail be?
One night, a man runs away from home. He turns left and keeps running. After some time he turns left again and keeps running. Later, he turns left one more time and runs back home—but when he gets home, he finds a man in a mask. Who was the man in the mask?
I ask Joseph to pick any 5 cards out of a deck with no Jokers.
He can inspect then shuffle the deck before picking any five cards. He picks out 5 cards then hands them to me (Jack can't see any of this). I look at the cards and I pick 1 card out and give it back to Joseph. I then arrange the other four cards in a special way, and give those 4 cards all face down, and in a neat pile, to Jack.
Jack looks at the 4 cards i gave him, and says out loud which card Joseph is holding (suit and number). How?
The solution uses pure logic, not sleight of hand. All Jack needs to know is the order of the cards and what is on their face, nothing more.
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.
