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 ...