A man was going to bleach his socks because they had gotten muddy the day before. As he was pouring the bleach into the washing machine, he spilt some on the floor. He got some cleaning fluid and mopped it up with a rag. Minutes later he was dead. What killed him?
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?
Six glasses are in a row. The first three are filled with milk and the last three are empty. By moving only one glass, can you arrange them so that the full and the empty glasses alternate?
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.
