You have an empty wine bottle with a cork that has been secured at the top in a normal way. There is a metal ring inside the bottle that is suspended by a string.
How can you make the metal ring drop to the bottom if you are not allowed to touch anything - not the bottle, not the cork, not the thread and not the ring?
There is a barrel with no lid and some wine in it. 'This barrel of wine is more than half full,' said Curly. 'No it's not,' says Mo. 'It's less than half full.' Without any measuring implements and without removing any wine from the barrel, how can they easily determine who is correct?
Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night. Unfortunately, they have only one torch and the bridge is too dangerous to cross without one. The bridge is only strong enough to support two people at a time. Not all people take the same time to cross the bridge. Times for each person: 1 min, 2 mins, 7 mins and 10 mins. What is the shortest time needed for all four of them to cross the bridge?
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.
