New Scientist - USA (2020-07-04)

54 | New Scientist | 4 July 2020

Puzzle

set by Hugh Hunt

#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’s age

is either a multiple of 9 (call this 9N)

or is 9N - 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’s 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’s future birthdays, they will

be 41/14, 52/25 etc. Of Jasmine’s

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

Answers

1 Deep Impact.

The probe released

an impactor that

excavated material

from the comet’s

nucleus, revealing

it to be surprisingly

dusty

2 Chicxulub, after

a nearby town in

Yucatán, 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

Twisteddoodles

for New Scientist

Tom Gauld

for New Scientist

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