problem-solving
edyong | June 10, 2009The German chemist Friedrich Kekule claimed to have intuited the chemical structure of the benzene ring after falling asleep in his chair and dreaming of an ouroboros (a serpent biting its own tail). He's certainly not the only person to have discovered a flash insight after waking from a good sleep. In science alone, many breakthroughs were apparently borne of a decent snooze, including Mendeleyev's creation of the Periodic Table and Loewi's experiments on the transmission of nervous signals through chemical messengers.
Most of us have tried sleeping on a difficult problem before and using…
edyong | April 27, 2009For many animals, living with others has obvious benefits. Social animals can hunt in packs, gain safety in numbers or even learn from each other. In some cases, they can even solve problems more quickly as a group than as individuals. That's even true for the humble house sparrow - Andras Liker and Veronika Bokony from the University of Pannonia, Hungary, found that groups of 6 sparrows are much faster at opening a tricky bird feeder than pairs of birds.
After ruling out several possible explanations, the duo put the speedy work of the bigger flock down to their greater odds of including…