James ordered a fishing rod, priced at $3.56. Unfortunately, James is an Eskimo who lives in a very remote part of Greenland and the import rules forbid any package longer than 4 feet to be imported. The fishing rod was 4 feet and 1 inch, just a little too long, so how can the fishing rod be mailed to James without breaking the rules? Ideally James would like the fishing rod to arrive in one piece!
An octopus has 8 legs. A hippogriff has 6 legs and 2 pairs of wings. A sphinx has 6 legs and one pair of wings. Now we have all 3 kinds and a total of 18 insects in a cage. We have a total of 118 legs and 20 pairs of wings. How many insects do we have of each kind?
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.
