These were the five questions of the 6 November 2026 round. Each story names its sources and how strong the evidence is.
One sketch, 915 million ways
Billund, Denmark
Clue: Lego bricks held together badly until a toy boss in this Danish town sketched tubes for the inside.
The first patented LEGO bricks of 1958, on show at the Danish Museum of Science and Technology in Helsingør in 2018.Photo: Leif Jørgensen (cropped) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to the studs and tubes, six 2x4 bricks can be combined in more than 915 million ways, LEGO says. Godtfred Kirk Christiansen of LEGO in Billund sketched the tubes in 1958 as one of several fixes for hollow bricks.
Clue: Plastic drink bottles from Asia kept washing up on this uninhabited central South Atlantic island.
Related photo
Not the island in the story: plastic bottles, nets and crates on a beach on Santa Luzia, Cape Verde, in the Atlantic, 2021.Photo: “Plastic Pollution in Santa Luzia, Cape Verde” by CaptainDarwin (cropped) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
On Inaccessible Island, 90% of newly arrived bottles were under two years old, too young to have drifted from Asia: Peter Ryan's team concluded they were probably dumped from ships (PNAS, 2019). In the 1980s, two-thirds came from South America.
Evidence: Emerging · One good study, or a few with known limitsPNAS (Ryan et al., 2019) ↗Checked 3 November 2026
Drains full of Mardi Gras beads
St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Clue: Crews sucked 93,000 pounds of plastic Mardi Gras beads out of drains on this US city's main parade route.
Related photo
Not the clean-up: Mardi Gras bead necklaces left hanging on a metal barricade in New Orleans after a parade, 2017.Photo: “Mardi Gras Beads on a Metal Blockade Gate” by Miguel Discart (resized) · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Most sat under five blocks of St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. The fix: orange sandbags and metal grates called 'gutter buddies'. Parade-goer Willie Noveck called stopping the throws ridiculous and suggested parade-goers work on their fielding instead.
Clue: A café owner answered a plan to bottle this south-east Australian town's water: stop selling water in plastic bottles.
Bundanoon's welcome sign, photographed in 2021, calls it 'The World's First Bottled Water Free Town'.Photo: Pabsoluterince (cropped) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
One no vote at Bundanoon's 2009 town meeting came from a bottled-water industry director. Café owner Huw Kingston's idea won, shops swapped bottled water for reusable bottles, and a lone piper led the march celebrating the ban's start.
Clue: Giant tortoises shared this remote Seychelles atoll with an estimated 513 tonnes of plastic litter.
Not a photo of the plastic: Aldabra giant tortoises on Aldabra Atoll, Seychelles, 2017.Photo: SIF (cropped) · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
That was after 12 volunteers removed 25 tonnes from Aldabra in five weeks in 2019, including an estimated 60,000 flip-flops (Scientific Reports, 2020). Even a giant tortoise's droppings there held part of a flip-flop.
