Earlier today I set you the following questions that the authors of Headscratchers, a new puzzle book, suggest are perfect for discussion and solving in licensed premises. The first one, in particular, leads itself to heated debate.Here they are again with sol... More »
Pubs are for drinking, socialising – and doing puzzles. Or so claims Headscratchers, a new compendium of puzzles from New Scientist magazine, from which today’s cranium-ticklers are taken.The first is a classic pub puzzle. (An inn-igma? a bam-booze-ler? A conu... More »
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fight against the disease was described by heads of government and public health bosses on primetime television.Countries would receive daily updates collated from data that had been analysed by the world-leading viro... More »
It’s little known to the throngs of tourists who gawp at the wonder of the Great Lakes but at the meeting point of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, a combined system that forms the largest lake in the world, there is a 70-year-old pipeline, battered and dented by... More »
A record-breaking number of “uber-rare” North American songbirds have arrived in the UK this week, blown over the Atlantic in the aftermath of Hurricane Lee.More than a dozen species of small songbirds – one of which has never been seen in the UK before – were... More »
NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 63,000 miles out. The small capsule landed four hours later... More »
What’s it like to be Elon Musk? On almost every level it is impossible to imagine – he’s just too much. Musk is the hands-on head of three mega-companies, one (Tesla) wildly successful, one (SpaceX) madly aspirational, one (Twitter/X) a shambles. He has plenty... More »
Fossil fuel companies should not be included in the Cop28 climate summit if they continue to block climate action, the UN’s former climate chief told reporters on Thursday.“If they are going to be there only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the... More »
BirdCast’s newest advances provide detailed flight forecasts of millions of birds. Van Doren, B.M. and Horton, K. 2023 migration map image. BirdCast, migration forecast map; Generated September 4, 2023, at 18:00 UTC. Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Color... More »
Roughly 250 million years ago, Earth’s land masses lay together in one supercontinent known as Pangea. Surrounded by a single ocean, known as Panthalassa, it saw the rise of the dinosaurs. Pangea was roughly shaped like Pac-Man, with land reaching to both nort... More »
An artist’s illustration of Quetzalcoatlus flying De Agostini via Getty ImagesOn May 17, 1986, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unleashed its flying reptile at Andrews Air Force Base. Known as Q.N. to the engin... More »
Earlier today I set you five problems from Creative Puzzles to Ignite Your Mind, a book of puzzles by Shyam Sunder Gupta, former Principal Chief Engineer of Indian Railways. Here they are again with solutions.1. Brahmagupta’s basketThe Indian mathematician Bra... More »