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?
John can fit six large chocolate boxes or nine small chocolate boxes into a carton. How many cartons will he require to put sixty-six chocolate boxes into?
In a science lab, a petri dish hosts a healthy colony of yeast for an experiment. Now every minute, all the yeast cells divide into two. At noon, there was just a single cell of yeast and at 1:22, the Petri dish was half full. Can you calculate when the dish will be full of yeast?
Jessica is telling her friends this story and asks them to guess if it’s the truth or a lie: “There was a man sitting in a house at night that had no lights on at all. There was no lamp, no candle, and no other source of light. Yet, he sat in the house and read his book happily.†Her friends say she’s lying, but Jessica corrects them and says she’s telling the truth. Jessica’s story is true—but how?
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.
