#66 Square tiles
My daughter has made me a puzzle with eight square tiles that fit into a 2 x 4 grid. She tells me there is a connection between the symbols along the rows, and a simple rule that gets you from the symbols on the top row to the symbols below them.
She has put four of the tiles in place for me. Where do the other four go?
Answer next week
#65 Father figures
Solution
The pattern arises if the father鈥檚 age is either a multiple of 9 (call this 9N) or is 9N 鈥� 1 when the baby is born. For example, if the dad is 27 when the baby arrives, then coincidences will happen every 11 years from 14 onwards: 14/41, 25/52, 36/63 and so on.
If the dad鈥檚 age is, say, 26 when the baby is born, the dad will turn 27 before the baby turns 1, meaning their ages will then be 27/0. So on the dad鈥檚 future birthdays, they will be 41/14, 52/25 etc. Of Jasmine鈥檚 90 Facebook friends, she should expect 2/9 of them (so 20 of her friends) to have experienced a dad-reversal at some point in their lives.
Quick quiz #58
1 Sharing its name with a 1998 film about a comet menacing Earth, which NASA probe rendezvoused with comet Tempel 1 in July 2005?
2 A large space rock collided with Earth 66 million years ago, possibly doing for the dinosaurs. What is the name of the crater it made?
3 What is the geological period dominated by the dinosaurs that this rock brought to an end?
4 Research in 2007 that sequenced proteins from Tyrannosaurus rex collagen indicated that it is almost genetically identical to that of what animal that still stalks the Earth?
5 What technique, often used in protein sequencing, determines a substance鈥檚 composition by ionising it and measuring individual elements鈥� mass and charge?
Answers
1 Deep Impact. The probe released an impactor that excavated material from the comet鈥檚 nucleus, revealing it to be surprisingly dusty
2 Chicxulub, after a nearby town in Yucat谩n, Mexico
3 The Cretaceous, which started 145 million years ago, after the Jurassic
4 The domestic chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus. Some researchers have questioned the finding
5 Mass spectrometry