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?
You walk into a room and see a bed. On the bed, there are two dogs, five cats, a giraffe, six cows, and a goose. There are also three doves flying above the bed. How many legs are on the floor?
Chef Andrea has to light the kitchen stoves to open her restaurant for the day. There are three stoves in the kitchen: A glass stove, a brick stove, and a wood stove. She only has one match. Which does she light up first?
Its something that each of us devours,
Not just us but birds, beats, trees, and flowers,
Frets iron and nibbles steel,
Toil hard stones to meal,
Exterminates king, collapse town,
And blows the mountains down.
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.
