We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, new Johns Hopkins ...

We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, Johns Hopkins ...

Despite how frequently we deal with knots—in our shoelaces, in our corded earphones, in our holiday gift-wrapping—they might be giving us more trouble than we realized. Two researchers from Johns ...

Humans are pretty good at guessing whether a towering stack of dishes in the sink will topple over or where a pool ball will go when a cue hits it. We evolved this kind of physical reasoning to ...

The researchers showed participants four knots that are physically similar but have a hierarchy of strength. People were asked to look at the knots, two at a time, and point to the strongest one. The ...