You have two strings whose only known property is that when you light one end of either string it takes exactly one hour to burn. The rate at which the strings will burn is completely random and each string is different.
A woman lives in a skyscraper thirty-six floors high and is served by several elevators which stop at each floor going up and down. Each morning she leaves her apartment and goes to one of the elevators. Whichever one she takes is three times more likely to be going up than down. Why?
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.
