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?
A thief enters a store and threatens the clerk, forcing her to open the safe. The clerk says, “The code for the safe is different every day, and if you hurt me you’ll never get the code.†But the thief manages to guess the code on his own. How did he do it?
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.