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New Scientist: Last Word #4
Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?: And 114 Other Questions
• What time is it at the North Pole?
• What's the chemical formula for a human being?
• Why do boomerangs come back?
• Why do flying fish fly?
• Do the living really outnumber the dead?
• Why does lightning fork?
• Why does the end of a whip crack?
Everyone has at one time or another thought up odd questions like these, questions that are strange, intriguing, maybe even impossible to answer. Making your morning omelet, perhaps you've wondered why most eggs are egg shaped. Or maybe, the last time you walked on the beach, you felt compelled to ask why the sea is salty. Watching Polly sit on her perch, have you ever marveled at how she stays there even when she's asleep? Well, the readers of New Scientist's wildly popular, long-running column "The Last Word" thought of these questions, too, and weren't afraid to ask them.
Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? is a brilliant collection of questions and answers for everyone who enjoyed the international, runaway bestseller Does Anything Eat Wasps? Guaranteed to amaze, inform, and delight with topics such as the human body, plants and animals, weird weather, and our wacky world, it'll stump you, enlighten you, entertain and amuse you.
• What's the chemical formula for a human being?
• Why do boomerangs come back?
• Why do flying fish fly?
• Do the living really outnumber the dead?
• Why does lightning fork?
• Why does the end of a whip crack?
Everyone has at one time or another thought up odd questions like these, questions that are strange, intriguing, maybe even impossible to answer. Making your morning omelet, perhaps you've wondered why most eggs are egg shaped. Or maybe, the last time you walked on the beach, you felt compelled to ask why the sea is salty. Watching Polly sit on her perch, have you ever marveled at how she stays there even when she's asleep? Well, the readers of New Scientist's wildly popular, long-running column "The Last Word" thought of these questions, too, and weren't afraid to ask them.
Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? is a brilliant collection of questions and answers for everyone who enjoyed the international, runaway bestseller Does Anything Eat Wasps? Guaranteed to amaze, inform, and delight with topics such as the human body, plants and animals, weird weather, and our wacky world, it'll stump you, enlighten you, entertain and amuse you.
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Mick O'Hare
27 books12 followersMick O’Hare (* 1964 in Mirfield, England) is a British editor and writer who travels between the US and the UK.
Currently, he is an editor for New Scientist, the leading British weekly for science, writing among other things the "The Last Word" column of questions and answers. He edited Profile’s bestselling book "Does Anything Eat Wasps?" and its successors "Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?" and "Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?".
Mick joined New Scientist in 1992 after being the production editor for Autosport. He still occasionally works as a rugby league writer and also edits sports books. He has a geology degree.
Currently, he is an editor for New Scientist, the leading British weekly for science, writing among other things the "The Last Word" column of questions and answers. He edited Profile’s bestselling book "Does Anything Eat Wasps?" and its successors "Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?" and "Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?".
Mick joined New Scientist in 1992 after being the production editor for Autosport. He still occasionally works as a rugby league writer and also edits sports books. He has a geology degree.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 147 reviews
May 30, 2015
I've finished the book and have discovered one gem above all others, but it's too late for me :-( Conkers. If you are British you would almost certainly have played conkers when you were in primary school. Every Autumn term you would pick up the fallen horse chestnuts and applied your chosen treatment to harden it, threaded it up and hoped you'd got the hardest one, a real champion, a ten-er maybe. I never got more than a six-er, but I pickled mine and as it turns out this was not the best treatment.
Everyone had their own method of hardening their conkers. Pickling, baking and even varnishing which was semi-illegal, were the favourites. But this book says that conkers from previous years would have dried out and been harder. The older the conker the harder it would be but they wouldn't be pretty and shiny but just a dull brown.
So that's a good tip. But something tells me old conkers weren't legal. I'm too old to remember though, is there anyone here young enough to know? LOL
________
Gem. Ants being able to run around in a microwave without being toasted. This is because they can sense where the current is and evade it. If you put a plate of marshmallows in the microwave they will cook unevenly (take out the turntable) and you will see the unevenness.
Gem. Hot water in a shallow or ice cube tray will freeze faster than cold water if places on a cold, frosty surface. The surface of the water will cool faster because of accelerated heat exchange and the bottom will melt the frost underneath slightly which will then refreeze and provide a bigger, colder surface to turn the water into ice. The bit that the book left out is that the ice cube tray is now stuck to the bottom of the freezer so you can't get it out and use the ice cubes anyway.
______
Not really a good book for reading but kind of ok for being stuck in queues where you expect to be called at any minute and can't really concentrate. Three stars is generous but that's me!
Everyone had their own method of hardening their conkers. Pickling, baking and even varnishing which was semi-illegal, were the favourites. But this book says that conkers from previous years would have dried out and been harder. The older the conker the harder it would be but they wouldn't be pretty and shiny but just a dull brown.
So that's a good tip. But something tells me old conkers weren't legal. I'm too old to remember though, is there anyone here young enough to know? LOL
________
Gem. Ants being able to run around in a microwave without being toasted. This is because they can sense where the current is and evade it. If you put a plate of marshmallows in the microwave they will cook unevenly (take out the turntable) and you will see the unevenness.
Gem. Hot water in a shallow or ice cube tray will freeze faster than cold water if places on a cold, frosty surface. The surface of the water will cool faster because of accelerated heat exchange and the bottom will melt the frost underneath slightly which will then refreeze and provide a bigger, colder surface to turn the water into ice. The bit that the book left out is that the ice cube tray is now stuck to the bottom of the freezer so you can't get it out and use the ice cubes anyway.
______
Not really a good book for reading but kind of ok for being stuck in queues where you expect to be called at any minute and can't really concentrate. Three stars is generous but that's me!
December 12, 2021
Sometimes, you find gems on the roadside, justifying the concept of serendipity. This book was such a find.
I was walking around town, looking for the office of my share-broker who had shifted, when I noticed this old guy with a pile of second-hand books on the pavement. 3 of them cost Indian Rupees 200/- (which is a bit over 2.5 Dollars, you Americans!), and most were in good condition. And most importantly, it had a lot of books apart from the run-of-the-mill romances and thrillers you find in such places.
Being a pop-science junkie, this book immediately caught my eye. A brief glance convinced me to buy it - and boy, did I make a good decision!
If we look around us, we can see a lot of phenomena which will set us wondering what were their causes. Children have this curiosity and keep on questioning - I remember my son, when he was three years old, pestering me continuously about the origin of lightning - but as we grow up, we slowly lose our sense of wonder and start accepting things as they are. But there are people who don't, and they send their questions to magazines like the New Scientist where they are answered by other readers - the experts and the not-so-experts. This happens in a column named "Last Word", and the questions and the discussion are fantastic. This book is a compilation of the best of them.
You can dip into the book at intervals, or read it at a stretch - you won't be bored if you like science. And BTW, the conversation is still going on here, at the New Scientist.
I was walking around town, looking for the office of my share-broker who had shifted, when I noticed this old guy with a pile of second-hand books on the pavement. 3 of them cost Indian Rupees 200/- (which is a bit over 2.5 Dollars, you Americans!), and most were in good condition. And most importantly, it had a lot of books apart from the run-of-the-mill romances and thrillers you find in such places.
Being a pop-science junkie, this book immediately caught my eye. A brief glance convinced me to buy it - and boy, did I make a good decision!
If we look around us, we can see a lot of phenomena which will set us wondering what were their causes. Children have this curiosity and keep on questioning - I remember my son, when he was three years old, pestering me continuously about the origin of lightning - but as we grow up, we slowly lose our sense of wonder and start accepting things as they are. But there are people who don't, and they send their questions to magazines like the New Scientist where they are answered by other readers - the experts and the not-so-experts. This happens in a column named "Last Word", and the questions and the discussion are fantastic. This book is a compilation of the best of them.
You can dip into the book at intervals, or read it at a stretch - you won't be bored if you like science. And BTW, the conversation is still going on here, at the New Scientist.
August 4, 2019
It's a nicely organised book, offering lots of answers to questions you'd never expect to have. The content was funny and witty, and most of the times, a person with minimal understanding of the physical world would get the general idea behind the given explanations. However, I found the absense of explanatory diagrammes and schemes quite disturbing. You can't describe experiments only with words or explain phenomena without some sort of visual help.
March 9, 2012
Pretty much like any of the other New Scientist books: full of information, some of it more interesting to me, some of it less. Some of the chosen answers are quite funny, and quite a few of the questions are quite weird. Some of the answers are very similar to principles in the other books, but for the most part there's a good spread of different information here. Well categorised, too: a section on human bodies, on food, on domestic science...
Also noticed that it works as a flipbook with a fishing penguin. Ha.
Also noticed that it works as a flipbook with a fishing penguin. Ha.
April 29, 2018
I learnt some interesting things, and found I could read this book either in long stints (e.g. on a long train ride) or by the occasional peruse. This is because the layout was based on the questions and answers. So if you only have a few minutes (e.g. in the doctor's waiting room), you could just read one question and the provided answers.
One thing I did find a little annoying was that for some of the questions, there were several answers that provided the exact same explanation, the additional answers provided did not reveal anything new. I found myself skipping a few pages because of this. However, there were many times were the extra answers provided were interesting. They either sparked debate, provided additional information, or purely comedic value.
If I was given the remaining books as a present, I would certainly read them.
One thing I did find a little annoying was that for some of the questions, there were several answers that provided the exact same explanation, the additional answers provided did not reveal anything new. I found myself skipping a few pages because of this. However, there were many times were the extra answers provided were interesting. They either sparked debate, provided additional information, or purely comedic value.
If I was given the remaining books as a present, I would certainly read them.
March 17, 2014
This book puts me to sleep, hahaha but seriously this is informative and well informative haha!
April 2, 2018
Some things were more interesting, some things were less interesting. A nice change after all that fiction that I've read recently :)
December 19, 2018
Small tidbits of information about a lot of different and random topics. It sort of feels like a bartender has written this as bartenders know a little about a lot of things, but not a lot about many things. The title drags you in because who doesn't want to know why penguins' feet don't freeze?! Then it takes you on a random journey or facts. Like being on a trivia show.
I liked that the book was narrated by many different people, which assisted in the question and answer format, but especially since the answers were provided by not only scientists from around the world but anyone who knew the answer and wrote it with it. Sometimes there were multiple answers, and even contradicting answers when a definitive answer has not been reached by consensus in the scientific community. There was even a very descriptive and informative answer given by a primary school student.
I liked that the book was narrated by many different people, which assisted in the question and answer format, but especially since the answers were provided by not only scientists from around the world but anyone who knew the answer and wrote it with it. Sometimes there were multiple answers, and even contradicting answers when a definitive answer has not been reached by consensus in the scientific community. There was even a very descriptive and informative answer given by a primary school student.
July 12, 2011
The book answered many questions across the science fields. Overall, it was very quick, interesting read. The questions and answers come from a column in the magazine New Scientist. The only drawback, in my opinion, is that the qualifications of those answering are seldom listed. Once in a while, someone lists that they are a professor at such-and-such university, or work at a company that directly relates to the question, so they can give a unique insight into the product/process being asked about, but for the most part, it is just a name, giving me more reason to doubt their qualifications vs those who specify why they know the answer.
July 29, 2020
หนังสือรวมคำตอบของคำถามที่น่าสนใจหลาย ๆ หัวข้อ บางคำถามก็เป็นคำถามวิชาการ บางคำถามก็มาจากการสังเกตปรากฏการณ์ทั่วไปที่เจอได้ในชีวิตประจำวัน หรือคำถามประหลาดที่คนทั่วไปคงไม่สงสัยกันแต่มีคนอยากรู้ขึ้นมา เหมือนที่ตอนเด็ก ๆ สงสัยสิ่งต่าง ๆ และอยากรู้คำอธิบายที่มาที่ไปของสิ่งหนึ่งหรือเหตุการณ์หนึ่ง
ที่น่าสนใจคือคำตอบ บางคำถามอาจมี 1-3 คนตอบเลย แล้วไม่ใช่เป็นการตอบทื่อ ๆ ถาม A ตอบ B
คงพยายามเอาคนจากสหวิชาชีพมาตอบ ดังนั้นคำตอบบางทีก็จะแสดงมุมมองที่เรานึกไม่ถึงด้วย มีหลายมุมมาก คนเรามาจากต่างพื้นเพก็อาจจะมองอะไรได้ต่างกัน แม้ว่าจะเป็นคำตอบสั้น ๆ แต่น่าสนใจมาก
บางคำถามที่เรารู้คำตอบแล้ว ก็จะมีคำตอบแนวอื่น ทั้งมุมมองทางวิทย์ ทั้งมุมมองทางสังคมประวัติศาสตร์ และอีกหลาย ๆ มุม
ยิ่งทำให้รู้สึกชื่นชมกับความรู้ศาสตร์ต่าง ๆ มาก และเข้าใจความจำเป็นของ multidisciplinary
หรือบางทีคำตอบก็ไม่ได้ตอบตรง ๆ เพราะมันตอบไม่ได้หรอก คำตอบจึงเป็นแนวอธิบายแทน ว่าน่าจะเป็นอย่างไรได้บ้างนะ ใช้แนวคิดไหนมาจับดีนะ บางทีก็มาเป็นข้อสันนิษฐานชวนคิดที่น่าสนใจและตลกดี
อ่านไปก็อารมณ์ดีและพลางคิดไปว่านี่คิดได้ยังไงกัน
บางทีคิดว่าได้คำตอบพอละ แต่ก็ยังตอบต่อเชื่อมโยงไปเหตุการณ์น่าสนใจอื่น ๆ อีก
เลยอ่านสนุกดี ได้เจออะไรใหม่ ๆ เปิดหูเปิดตามาก
บางคำถามที่มีคนตอบมากกว่าหนึ่ง
จะเป็นคำตอบ thread ลงมา
ไม่ใช่ว่าคนแรกจะอธิบายถูกเสมอไป
บางทีคนที่สองก็มาอธิบายว่าที่คนแรกว่าไว้ไม่น่าจะใช่นะ น่าจะเป็นอันนี้มากกว่า
แบบนี้ก็ดี รู้สึกมีคนมาเถียงในหัวแทนให้
อย่าเชื่ออะไรง่าย ๆ ให้ลองคิดไตร่ตรองดูก่อนนะ
หรือบางคำตอบก็ตั้งใจมาเล่นมุกอย่างเดียวเลย ก็ขำ ๆ แป๊ก ๆ แต่ตลกดีแบบมุก geek ๆ อะ
——-
เรื่องน่าสนใจที่มีคำอธิบายที่ชอบ เช่น
แชมพูขจัดรังแคทำงานยังไง?
ทำไมสูดฮีเลียมพูดออกมาแล้วเสียงเล็กแหลม?
ทำไมบางคนเวลาตั้งใจทำอะไร ชอบแลบลิ้นงับริมฝีปากไว้?
เป็นเรื่องบังเอิญหรือตั้งใจที่ขนาดนิ้วพอดีกับรูจมูก เพื่อจะได้แคะจมูกได้สะดวกรึเปล่า?
ทำไมขี้มูกมักจะเป็นสีเขียว?
ทำไมชีสยืดได้?
ฯลฯ
——-
อ่านจบแล้วมีช่วงที่ทำให้ว้าว แล้วก็มีช่วงน่าเบื่อ ๆ อยู่เหมือนกัน
เป็นหนังสือที่อ่านได้เพลิน ๆ
May 27, 2021
I've had this in my bathroom for a few weeks, and it makes for a decent 'loo read', but in truth it was a bit lightweight, a bit patchy and a bit repetitive. I can understand finding many of the queries far from new because of both my having read plenty of New Scientist in my time, and also because of my professional scientific knowledge/experience. Less so, I partly understand that throwing in a few 'simple questions asked by kids' alongside the more complex ones makes for variety. I found however that most sections had two or three answers which overlapped significantly and this made for a repetitive reading experience. For 50p however, which is what I paid, not a big problem, though had I paid full price of eight or nine quid, it would've felt poor value for money.
November 15, 2024
A bit disappointed with this one, I was really excited for this one as I absolutely love little facts and science, but I got confused and a bit bored. Like a lot of the questions have multiple answers and sometimes there were a lot of different explanations which made me confused about what the real answer now was and then sometimes there were multiple answers that said the same like 3 times so I don’t know why the extra answers were there then.
January 4, 2025
While the facts themselves are interesting, reading multiple answers to the same questions gets a bit tiresome after a while. I know it goes against the whole format, but the book would probably read much better if multiple answers are merged together, crediting all the submitters at the end.
October 28, 2026
This was a fun read for me.
I picked it up on the side of the road at a used book store for less than a dollar. It was quick ,and I was able to finish it in basically a day, and the language was easy to follow. The topics changed quickly so. I was never really bored, and if I was I was happy to read ahead to the next question. I love uncovering interesting factoids. I think the art of a good fact is something that reshapes your view of the world and makes you more curious about things you had not yet considered before, yet is something you might overlook in your daily life. I think its good at provoking thought and making you more curious. The problem however with a book like this, is that often the facts pleasure is it novelty. Reading a book of facts that you are already familiar with loses a lot of its luster. So when I pick up a book like this or watch a video about interesting facts, it always a gamble to see if its actually something you have heard about before.
The format of the book is a question followed by multiple answers. Each answer is written by different people and some of them are responding to each other.
I think this book was written in 2006, which is an early internet area, where it was much less popular and people were not terminally online. This book reads like a bunch of reddit commenters or answers on quora. I don't think this book can exist in the same way today because the itch that this book is scratching is now mostly getting filled by different corners of the internet. I can see though how at the time this book was written it might have had more appeal.
However today, I am reading a book to get off the Internet. To find material with a little bit more credibility and energy put into its composure. And what this book feels like is just pre-internet internet. The actual quality of the answers is what you might expect to find in a comments section on youtube about a subject. Most of the answers in this book standalone without any commentary from the editors and the book doesn't make any attempt to fact check them. On top of that, many of the answers to the question either answer the exact same material, so you end up re-reading the same thing over and over again, or they completely contradict each other. There is no authoritative voice. Some of the answers are given by scientist in a related field so there is at least a little bit of credibility, but most of the time the answers are just postulating what they think the answer would be based on their own intuitions. There isn't a lot of rigour or quality to the answers and many of them contain false information. Or at least information that is speculation.
And I see the value in speculation. Speculation from others is a good starting place to get the reader to think about the question at hand. However from there we aren't provided any more valuable insights or confirmation, or serious results from experimentation or rigorous calculation, or thoughts from a research that has actually studied that question. Its like answers from scientists who had a colleague study something related. Or just some random guy named Robert from Tennessee mansplaining the answer because he thinks himself to a well educated and thoughtful guy.
This is all fine, but again , its what I expect from a comment section. When its presented in the book format, it has a certain level of authority, that can mislead the reader to thinking is is more credible than it actually is. It makes me feel skeptical of the answers in the book and that I have now been inundated with false information have a bunch of brain worms sticking around or interesting, but ultimately false facts. I would read something that I think would be plausible and interesting. Then I would go on to read the next question and be fed something that is clearly false, or at least speculative. It would make me doubt the previous thing I had just read so confidently.
The repeated answers did help in some cases because they allowed me to try to understand a concept from multiple perspectives until at least one of them stuck. This has confirmed to me that often , if you are not understanding something, it really is best to hear it explained from as many sources as possible until one of them sticks.
None the less I did enjoy it anyways and were confronted with som interesting questions and facts.
Here are just some of them:
Learned facts:
The Shape Of Eggs:
Eggs are shaped that way because that makes them easier to pass through a chickens system. However the more important question is why are they not just spheres. Supposedly the theory is that they have evolved this way, to be an egg shape with that conical shape because it makes them more likely to roll in circles. This is useful, because it makes the egg more likely to stay in the nest instead of fall out. In birds that nest on cliffs or high places, where the dangers of a rolling egg are more pronounced, we see eggs with steeper cones, which makes the arc of the circle they roll in shorter, and more prone to staying in the nest.
Ocean Waves:
Prior to this book, I guess I hadn't really thought about it much, but ocean waves are not generated by the moons pull. Tides are generated by the moons pull, but that doesn't mean the waves are. Waves are generated by ocean winds. The wind rubs against the waves and creates friction, imparting a kind of motion onto the ocean in the direction of the wind. How exactly these waves form from flat water is not entirely understood and is still the subject of scientific debate. Waves are immensely complicated, even if this book makes it seem like it has some confident answers. Usually from flat water, small disturbances or differences in the air will create small surface ripples. Once a ripple has formed, wind traveling over that ripple will be directed over and upwards over the wave. On the up, the wind drags along the ripple, making it more pronounced. On the frontside of the wave, the air traveling over the wave creates an air pocket or a low pressure zone. This has an additional effect of pulling the wave in the front up. Once a wave has gathered enough speed and energy gravity can take over as a driving force. Gravity tries to pull the wave down, but at this point the wave energy and mass needs a place to go. Like pushing down on a crumpled bump in a carpet, it will cause the energy to upwell again immediately beside it. This is my naive understanding which I think is completely wrong , and has made me much more curious about waves.
Gravitational Slingshot:
I had heard about space ships and satellite's and asteroids being launched by falling into another planets gravity. What I had not considered is how this effectively works. In theory, a mass that is falling towards a planet due to gravity should maintain its total energy. If it is able to escape the gravitational pull and get "slingshotted" in some way it would have had to gain more energy than it started with in some way. Where the satellite gets its energy from when it is being launched by the gravity field of another planet, is from the planet itself. Part of the energy equation involves mass. And the mass of the satellite is infinitesimally small in comparison to the mass of the planet it is orbiting around. The planet also is traveling around the sun. So when a satellite comes by its like getting a skateboarder holding onto a car and getting a boost. Its leveraging the energy in the orbiting planet.
Salty Sea:
Salt is incredibly soluble in water, and is contained in trace amounts in all kinds of rocks. As rainwater collects into lakes and rivers, it takes a long journey where it runs over various different minerals and soaks up many of the salts. As it eventually makes its way to the ocean it brings along with it salts. Once in the ocean, the water evaporates into the sky , leaving behind its salts. Large lakes , that don't have a route out to the ocean and cant cycle the water, eventually do become salty.
Double Sided tide:
You might have heard that the tide is caused by the moon. Because the moon has a gravitational attraction it pulls on the water on earth, and causes it to bulge towards the moon. However, the water on earth also bulges on the opposite side away from the moon. This is because the moon doesn't just orbit around earth, the earth also orbits around the moon. They orbit around a centre point somewhere between the two of them. This means that the earth is flung out from that center point the way if you attach something to a rope and swing it in circles , it pulls away from the central point of rotation. In this way, a centrifugal force pulls the water outwards and makes it bulge away.
You can shine a flash light at an egg to see how many yolks there are because flashlights are bright, and the egg shells are thin.
Shaking Your Wine:
It is often said that you should let your wine breath after opening it. However, one could ask why not shake it all up to let it breather faster? The reason is because we are not just trying to get oxegeon into the wine, in fact getting to much oxegeon into the wine ruins the taste. Part of the reason you want wine to breath, is for poor tasting gases or compounds trapped in the wine to escape. So you want things to dissolve out, without letting too much oxegeon in.
Onions:
Onion are well known for making people cry and irritating the eyes. Part of the reason this happens is because onions contain a compound called syn-propanethial-S-oxide , which reacts with the water on your eyeballs to produce Sulfuric acid which is caustic. Your eyes react by creating more water to wash it away.
Anisette and sambucca turn white when water is added because it displaces other materials in the liquid. When the compound is dissolved it takes on a different colour that is clear in the alcohol. But when water is added the alcohol and water mix with each other displacing the dissolved material.
Fridge Bananas:
Some fruits preserve well in the fridge while other don't. Bananas are from hotter climates, and the cell membrane in the skin is designed in such away, that the cell membrane is destroyed when it gets too cold. Once the cell membrane is destroyed it allows molecules to mix that usually are separated causing it to oxidise and decay quicker. However the fruit inside usually is fine.
Red and white Meat:
Different animals have varying colours of muscle tissue. It is theorised that this has to do with the ability to carry more oxygen to the muscle tissue. The colour red is associated with the presence of iron, because oxygenated iron whose colour is red is used to carry blood through out the body. Muscles that are used for sustained activity tend to have more of a protein called myoglobin which helps with oxygenation. Muscles that are used less frequently or in shorter bursts usually have less myoglobin.
Fly Swatters:
Flys can avoid rain because air curves around rain drops as they are falling. Flys are so small that in their world a small change in air completely pushes them around. So as the air curves around the drop, so goes the fly. This is also why fly swatters have holes. Without holes, the air would try to escape from under the fly swatter, and bring the fly with it. By creating holes, it brings the fly up to the flyswatter and prevents it from being swept away.
Runny noses in winter are caused by condensation. Winter cold does not directly make you sicker. Inly indirectly
Rain clouds are darker because the “pre-rain” water particles are bigger and absorb more light. Not because the. Clouds are thicker per se,
Airplanes need to be pressurised to mimic the air pressure at sea levl on earth so humans can live. High in the air the air pressure is too low. However, if you pressurise the cabin of an airplane, its like an overinflated balloon thats always trying to pop, making it more likely to burst and put extra strain on the airplane. This means that to counteract this, the airplane lows the pressure manually as low as it possibly can while still keeping humans safe. Thats why your ears still pop even if its pressurised.
Parachutes have a hole in them to help direct airflow upwards. Without it air will try to escape out the sides which can lead to instability. This instability of the parachute can cause it to get pushed around or to oscillate in a death spiral leading to more complications.
Mercury melts aluminuum because the two are very reactive together. It the combination of the two creates a mixture, turning aluminum to putty. Most aircrafts are made out of aluminium because it is lightweight and durable. Due to this mercury is usually not allowed on aircrafts and is sometimes why you can see a "no thermometers" sign when boarding.
Boats don't have a gear box. In a car a gear box is needed to change between levels of torque and speed. When a car is stationary, it takes a lot of energy and mechanical advantage to start its motion. The use of gears allows a conversion between the required torque for the motion of the car, and the torque produce by the engine. However in a boat, because the medium through which the boat is traveling through, is not hard dirt, but water, the water can absorb most of the transitions in speed and mechanical energy.
———————————————
Questions I don't think were rigorously answered but are still good questions
What time is it at the north pole?
Does hot water freeze faster?
Do you breath some of the same air as da vinci?
When you pour liquid it makes a stream thats a spiral, why is that?
Why are dogs noses black?
Why do birds make white feces? Why is it solid paste and not water soluble?
Why do flying fish fly?
Penguins cold feet?
Why don't fish die when lightning strikes water?
Why do birds not fall off branches when sleeping?
Why is nasal mucous green?
Why do people stick their tongue out when focusing?
Why do boomerangs return?
I picked it up on the side of the road at a used book store for less than a dollar. It was quick ,and I was able to finish it in basically a day, and the language was easy to follow. The topics changed quickly so. I was never really bored, and if I was I was happy to read ahead to the next question. I love uncovering interesting factoids. I think the art of a good fact is something that reshapes your view of the world and makes you more curious about things you had not yet considered before, yet is something you might overlook in your daily life. I think its good at provoking thought and making you more curious. The problem however with a book like this, is that often the facts pleasure is it novelty. Reading a book of facts that you are already familiar with loses a lot of its luster. So when I pick up a book like this or watch a video about interesting facts, it always a gamble to see if its actually something you have heard about before.
The format of the book is a question followed by multiple answers. Each answer is written by different people and some of them are responding to each other.
I think this book was written in 2006, which is an early internet area, where it was much less popular and people were not terminally online. This book reads like a bunch of reddit commenters or answers on quora. I don't think this book can exist in the same way today because the itch that this book is scratching is now mostly getting filled by different corners of the internet. I can see though how at the time this book was written it might have had more appeal.
However today, I am reading a book to get off the Internet. To find material with a little bit more credibility and energy put into its composure. And what this book feels like is just pre-internet internet. The actual quality of the answers is what you might expect to find in a comments section on youtube about a subject. Most of the answers in this book standalone without any commentary from the editors and the book doesn't make any attempt to fact check them. On top of that, many of the answers to the question either answer the exact same material, so you end up re-reading the same thing over and over again, or they completely contradict each other. There is no authoritative voice. Some of the answers are given by scientist in a related field so there is at least a little bit of credibility, but most of the time the answers are just postulating what they think the answer would be based on their own intuitions. There isn't a lot of rigour or quality to the answers and many of them contain false information. Or at least information that is speculation.
And I see the value in speculation. Speculation from others is a good starting place to get the reader to think about the question at hand. However from there we aren't provided any more valuable insights or confirmation, or serious results from experimentation or rigorous calculation, or thoughts from a research that has actually studied that question. Its like answers from scientists who had a colleague study something related. Or just some random guy named Robert from Tennessee mansplaining the answer because he thinks himself to a well educated and thoughtful guy.
This is all fine, but again , its what I expect from a comment section. When its presented in the book format, it has a certain level of authority, that can mislead the reader to thinking is is more credible than it actually is. It makes me feel skeptical of the answers in the book and that I have now been inundated with false information have a bunch of brain worms sticking around or interesting, but ultimately false facts. I would read something that I think would be plausible and interesting. Then I would go on to read the next question and be fed something that is clearly false, or at least speculative. It would make me doubt the previous thing I had just read so confidently.
The repeated answers did help in some cases because they allowed me to try to understand a concept from multiple perspectives until at least one of them stuck. This has confirmed to me that often , if you are not understanding something, it really is best to hear it explained from as many sources as possible until one of them sticks.
None the less I did enjoy it anyways and were confronted with som interesting questions and facts.
Here are just some of them:
Learned facts:
The Shape Of Eggs:
Eggs are shaped that way because that makes them easier to pass through a chickens system. However the more important question is why are they not just spheres. Supposedly the theory is that they have evolved this way, to be an egg shape with that conical shape because it makes them more likely to roll in circles. This is useful, because it makes the egg more likely to stay in the nest instead of fall out. In birds that nest on cliffs or high places, where the dangers of a rolling egg are more pronounced, we see eggs with steeper cones, which makes the arc of the circle they roll in shorter, and more prone to staying in the nest.
Ocean Waves:
Prior to this book, I guess I hadn't really thought about it much, but ocean waves are not generated by the moons pull. Tides are generated by the moons pull, but that doesn't mean the waves are. Waves are generated by ocean winds. The wind rubs against the waves and creates friction, imparting a kind of motion onto the ocean in the direction of the wind. How exactly these waves form from flat water is not entirely understood and is still the subject of scientific debate. Waves are immensely complicated, even if this book makes it seem like it has some confident answers. Usually from flat water, small disturbances or differences in the air will create small surface ripples. Once a ripple has formed, wind traveling over that ripple will be directed over and upwards over the wave. On the up, the wind drags along the ripple, making it more pronounced. On the frontside of the wave, the air traveling over the wave creates an air pocket or a low pressure zone. This has an additional effect of pulling the wave in the front up. Once a wave has gathered enough speed and energy gravity can take over as a driving force. Gravity tries to pull the wave down, but at this point the wave energy and mass needs a place to go. Like pushing down on a crumpled bump in a carpet, it will cause the energy to upwell again immediately beside it. This is my naive understanding which I think is completely wrong , and has made me much more curious about waves.
Gravitational Slingshot:
I had heard about space ships and satellite's and asteroids being launched by falling into another planets gravity. What I had not considered is how this effectively works. In theory, a mass that is falling towards a planet due to gravity should maintain its total energy. If it is able to escape the gravitational pull and get "slingshotted" in some way it would have had to gain more energy than it started with in some way. Where the satellite gets its energy from when it is being launched by the gravity field of another planet, is from the planet itself. Part of the energy equation involves mass. And the mass of the satellite is infinitesimally small in comparison to the mass of the planet it is orbiting around. The planet also is traveling around the sun. So when a satellite comes by its like getting a skateboarder holding onto a car and getting a boost. Its leveraging the energy in the orbiting planet.
Salty Sea:
Salt is incredibly soluble in water, and is contained in trace amounts in all kinds of rocks. As rainwater collects into lakes and rivers, it takes a long journey where it runs over various different minerals and soaks up many of the salts. As it eventually makes its way to the ocean it brings along with it salts. Once in the ocean, the water evaporates into the sky , leaving behind its salts. Large lakes , that don't have a route out to the ocean and cant cycle the water, eventually do become salty.
Double Sided tide:
You might have heard that the tide is caused by the moon. Because the moon has a gravitational attraction it pulls on the water on earth, and causes it to bulge towards the moon. However, the water on earth also bulges on the opposite side away from the moon. This is because the moon doesn't just orbit around earth, the earth also orbits around the moon. They orbit around a centre point somewhere between the two of them. This means that the earth is flung out from that center point the way if you attach something to a rope and swing it in circles , it pulls away from the central point of rotation. In this way, a centrifugal force pulls the water outwards and makes it bulge away.
You can shine a flash light at an egg to see how many yolks there are because flashlights are bright, and the egg shells are thin.
Shaking Your Wine:
It is often said that you should let your wine breath after opening it. However, one could ask why not shake it all up to let it breather faster? The reason is because we are not just trying to get oxegeon into the wine, in fact getting to much oxegeon into the wine ruins the taste. Part of the reason you want wine to breath, is for poor tasting gases or compounds trapped in the wine to escape. So you want things to dissolve out, without letting too much oxegeon in.
Onions:
Onion are well known for making people cry and irritating the eyes. Part of the reason this happens is because onions contain a compound called syn-propanethial-S-oxide , which reacts with the water on your eyeballs to produce Sulfuric acid which is caustic. Your eyes react by creating more water to wash it away.
Anisette and sambucca turn white when water is added because it displaces other materials in the liquid. When the compound is dissolved it takes on a different colour that is clear in the alcohol. But when water is added the alcohol and water mix with each other displacing the dissolved material.
Fridge Bananas:
Some fruits preserve well in the fridge while other don't. Bananas are from hotter climates, and the cell membrane in the skin is designed in such away, that the cell membrane is destroyed when it gets too cold. Once the cell membrane is destroyed it allows molecules to mix that usually are separated causing it to oxidise and decay quicker. However the fruit inside usually is fine.
Red and white Meat:
Different animals have varying colours of muscle tissue. It is theorised that this has to do with the ability to carry more oxygen to the muscle tissue. The colour red is associated with the presence of iron, because oxygenated iron whose colour is red is used to carry blood through out the body. Muscles that are used for sustained activity tend to have more of a protein called myoglobin which helps with oxygenation. Muscles that are used less frequently or in shorter bursts usually have less myoglobin.
Fly Swatters:
Flys can avoid rain because air curves around rain drops as they are falling. Flys are so small that in their world a small change in air completely pushes them around. So as the air curves around the drop, so goes the fly. This is also why fly swatters have holes. Without holes, the air would try to escape from under the fly swatter, and bring the fly with it. By creating holes, it brings the fly up to the flyswatter and prevents it from being swept away.
Runny noses in winter are caused by condensation. Winter cold does not directly make you sicker. Inly indirectly
Rain clouds are darker because the “pre-rain” water particles are bigger and absorb more light. Not because the. Clouds are thicker per se,
Airplanes need to be pressurised to mimic the air pressure at sea levl on earth so humans can live. High in the air the air pressure is too low. However, if you pressurise the cabin of an airplane, its like an overinflated balloon thats always trying to pop, making it more likely to burst and put extra strain on the airplane. This means that to counteract this, the airplane lows the pressure manually as low as it possibly can while still keeping humans safe. Thats why your ears still pop even if its pressurised.
Parachutes have a hole in them to help direct airflow upwards. Without it air will try to escape out the sides which can lead to instability. This instability of the parachute can cause it to get pushed around or to oscillate in a death spiral leading to more complications.
Mercury melts aluminuum because the two are very reactive together. It the combination of the two creates a mixture, turning aluminum to putty. Most aircrafts are made out of aluminium because it is lightweight and durable. Due to this mercury is usually not allowed on aircrafts and is sometimes why you can see a "no thermometers" sign when boarding.
Boats don't have a gear box. In a car a gear box is needed to change between levels of torque and speed. When a car is stationary, it takes a lot of energy and mechanical advantage to start its motion. The use of gears allows a conversion between the required torque for the motion of the car, and the torque produce by the engine. However in a boat, because the medium through which the boat is traveling through, is not hard dirt, but water, the water can absorb most of the transitions in speed and mechanical energy.
———————————————
Questions I don't think were rigorously answered but are still good questions
What time is it at the north pole?
Does hot water freeze faster?
Do you breath some of the same air as da vinci?
When you pour liquid it makes a stream thats a spiral, why is that?
Why are dogs noses black?
Why do birds make white feces? Why is it solid paste and not water soluble?
Why do flying fish fly?
Penguins cold feet?
Why don't fish die when lightning strikes water?
Why do birds not fall off branches when sleeping?
Why is nasal mucous green?
Why do people stick their tongue out when focusing?
Why do boomerangs return?
December 6, 2017
"The question has certainly made me reluctant to take accepted wisdom for granted when it comes to observations which do not fit preconceived notions of what is correct."
There are some really fun, interesting questions in this book. I enjoy the Last Word section of New Scientist, as the questioners often take something so familiar that I can often take for granted and make me think more methodically about phenomena I encounter every day. Reading the collection in this book was fun as a trivia collection, and also as a puzzle book, as I tried to come up with an explanation for each question before reading the contributors' submissions. A light work out for my brain and well-suited to bright teenagers.
My favourite question posed was: Two people lose each other while wandering through the isles of a large supermarket. Should one person stop moving, or would they encounter each other sooner if both were moving through the isles? My intuition was that the friends would be reunited faster if both were actively looking, but I couldn't back this up. I started thinking about two independent random walks and the probability of their intersecting in a finite time versus the probability of a single random walk intersecting a given point. This led to an interesting conversation with my mathematician husband Baby Adam about the 'coupling' of random walks being used to generate probabilities for these moving closer together or further apart. It's amazing how much there is to think about in these simple everyday problems!
Other stand-out questions included: Why is it when I walk home from the pub after a few beers, I always stumble to the left? As a neuroscientist, I immediately focuses on the dominant eye, but others wrote about the dominant leg, or the more muscular leg, and it got me wondering what happens for people whose dominant eye and leg are on the opposite side of their body? (I am all left-sided.) Is there any connection between being cold and catching a cold? This is a favourite old-wives' tale of my mother's, so it was interesting to see people write in about the initial chill that comes before the cold fever as reverse causality, but nothing about being cold lowering peoples' immune systems? Why do sheep always run in a straight line in front of cars and not to the side? Basically, sheep want to avoid exposing their throat to fast, manoeuvrable predators such as wolves and big cats. But why don't the sheep learn that cars are nowhere near as lithe as wolves and in fact have huge turning circles? They have a folded cerebral cortex after all! If Polar bears were transferred to Antarctica would they survive? And would penguins survive in the Arctic? Thankfully for the beautiful Emperor penguin, no one has put polar bears in Antarctica, but I was amazed to learn that in 1936, penguins were introduced to Norway to replace the extinct great auk, but suffered the same predation by man. Why is an image in a mirror inverted left to right and not top to bottom? This was one of those questions that seemed simple, just because it is so familiar and effect. It was interesting to think about the human psychological bias to understand this effect in terms of rotation rather than reflection, but I will still need to think about this a little longer before I am sure I have it understood. What time is it at the North Pole? There was only really cool answer which gave a method for making a star or sun based 24-hour clock to track the passage of hours in 6-month darkness or light. We have tried the experiment taught by science teachers in which a candle immersed in water is covered by an upturned glass. This question, which was the source of the pull-quote at the beginning of my review, debunked the common explanation that the candle will only go out once all the oxygen in the air is used up by showing that the volume of air left in the jar is less when more candles are present. It was interesting to question the status-quo and find that the traditional explanation had omitted the simple phenomenon that the air will expand when being heated by the candles and that part of the reduction in volume is due to decreased temperature of the air under the jar.
And I liked finding out once and for all why Rock the Boat bottled ale is better than Budweiser!
Not all of the questions were interesting to me, there were a few about gun accidents that just made me sad, and several about wines which I am simply too working-class to claim to understand. But overall the questions were fun, the most entertaining being the ones that had an abstract component that could be contemplated from several different angles.
There are some really fun, interesting questions in this book. I enjoy the Last Word section of New Scientist, as the questioners often take something so familiar that I can often take for granted and make me think more methodically about phenomena I encounter every day. Reading the collection in this book was fun as a trivia collection, and also as a puzzle book, as I tried to come up with an explanation for each question before reading the contributors' submissions. A light work out for my brain and well-suited to bright teenagers.
My favourite question posed was: Two people lose each other while wandering through the isles of a large supermarket. Should one person stop moving, or would they encounter each other sooner if both were moving through the isles? My intuition was that the friends would be reunited faster if both were actively looking, but I couldn't back this up. I started thinking about two independent random walks and the probability of their intersecting in a finite time versus the probability of a single random walk intersecting a given point. This led to an interesting conversation with my mathematician husband Baby Adam about the 'coupling' of random walks being used to generate probabilities for these moving closer together or further apart. It's amazing how much there is to think about in these simple everyday problems!
Other stand-out questions included: Why is it when I walk home from the pub after a few beers, I always stumble to the left? As a neuroscientist, I immediately focuses on the dominant eye, but others wrote about the dominant leg, or the more muscular leg, and it got me wondering what happens for people whose dominant eye and leg are on the opposite side of their body? (I am all left-sided.) Is there any connection between being cold and catching a cold? This is a favourite old-wives' tale of my mother's, so it was interesting to see people write in about the initial chill that comes before the cold fever as reverse causality, but nothing about being cold lowering peoples' immune systems? Why do sheep always run in a straight line in front of cars and not to the side? Basically, sheep want to avoid exposing their throat to fast, manoeuvrable predators such as wolves and big cats. But why don't the sheep learn that cars are nowhere near as lithe as wolves and in fact have huge turning circles? They have a folded cerebral cortex after all! If Polar bears were transferred to Antarctica would they survive? And would penguins survive in the Arctic? Thankfully for the beautiful Emperor penguin, no one has put polar bears in Antarctica, but I was amazed to learn that in 1936, penguins were introduced to Norway to replace the extinct great auk, but suffered the same predation by man. Why is an image in a mirror inverted left to right and not top to bottom? This was one of those questions that seemed simple, just because it is so familiar and effect. It was interesting to think about the human psychological bias to understand this effect in terms of rotation rather than reflection, but I will still need to think about this a little longer before I am sure I have it understood. What time is it at the North Pole? There was only really cool answer which gave a method for making a star or sun based 24-hour clock to track the passage of hours in 6-month darkness or light. We have tried the experiment taught by science teachers in which a candle immersed in water is covered by an upturned glass. This question, which was the source of the pull-quote at the beginning of my review, debunked the common explanation that the candle will only go out once all the oxygen in the air is used up by showing that the volume of air left in the jar is less when more candles are present. It was interesting to question the status-quo and find that the traditional explanation had omitted the simple phenomenon that the air will expand when being heated by the candles and that part of the reduction in volume is due to decreased temperature of the air under the jar.
And I liked finding out once and for all why Rock the Boat bottled ale is better than Budweiser!
Not all of the questions were interesting to me, there were a few about gun accidents that just made me sad, and several about wines which I am simply too working-class to claim to understand. But overall the questions were fun, the most entertaining being the ones that had an abstract component that could be contemplated from several different angles.
October 7, 2020
Book itself was okay, the questions are interesting and some are stuff I did wonder about myself, but the fact that each question is answered by someone else, most of which are not actual specialists in the field is kinda not cool at all, it makes it not differnt from just googling stuff. This also causes inconsistency in the answers, because each is answered in a different way, and sometimes there will be two contradicting answers to the same question which is very confusing.
The audiobook on the other hand was horrible, each question/ answer is read by someone new with differnt accent different way of speech differnt notes, it makes it very inconsistent once again and very distracting, because each time I'll have to get used to the way that person says things. And the sound effects with every question are just too much.
I wouldn't recommend reading this book, if you want to read this sort of book with extremely good answers explained in an interesting easy to understand way, I recommend reading what if? By Randall Munroe.
The audiobook on the other hand was horrible, each question/ answer is read by someone new with differnt accent different way of speech differnt notes, it makes it very inconsistent once again and very distracting, because each time I'll have to get used to the way that person says things. And the sound effects with every question are just too much.
I wouldn't recommend reading this book, if you want to read this sort of book with extremely good answers explained in an interesting easy to understand way, I recommend reading what if? By Randall Munroe.
August 15, 2010
home audio
Daily Express - 'a fascinating mix of the baffling, ridiculous and trivial...answers the scientific questions you never got round to asking.' Independent on Sunday - 'at last, the mysteries of the world are explained...the book everyone is talking about' Daily Mirror - 'They are the things we've all wondered about, from why we cry when we slice onions, to what makes our hair turn grey...' BBC Radio 5 Live - 'Extraordinary book...responsible for putting popular science back on its feet'
Daily Express - 'a fascinating mix of the baffling, ridiculous and trivial...answers the scientific questions you never got round to asking.' Independent on Sunday - 'at last, the mysteries of the world are explained...the book everyone is talking about' Daily Mirror - 'They are the things we've all wondered about, from why we cry when we slice onions, to what makes our hair turn grey...' BBC Radio 5 Live - 'Extraordinary book...responsible for putting popular science back on its feet'
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 7, 2016
A few of the questions asked in this book where interesting and there were even a couple of humorous responses, but the vast majority didn't really capture my attention. In many cases the questions had several answers provided, which would have been fine if they all added something new to the discussion, but most of the time they just regurgitated the same sort of responses. I also wasn't a fan of the complicated scientific jargon... I love to learn new things, but a lot of this either a.) went over my head, or b.) made my eyes start to glaze over.
December 26, 2010
This book is a series of questions that have been answered by readers of the New Scientist magazine. Most of the questions were interesting but others I did not care about at all. The questions are grouped under themes that makes up the chapters of this book. I feel that some of the answers can be further filtered so you do not end up with questions with 3 or 4 different answers. This is one of those books that you pick up and read a question from time to time.
January 24, 2014
I found myself struggling to finish this book. Some answers to questions are unreasonably long which makes the reader bored.
September 29, 2014
Questions sent in by readers of New Scientist are answered.
Personally only few questions where in there for me.
Some rather humorous.
Personally only few questions where in there for me.
Some rather humorous.
April 9, 2018
Zzzzzzzz...
June 14, 2018
Interesting, I would have preferred more editor notes that maybe summarised answers more, otherwise, worth a read!
June 9, 2019
This book, from the New Scientist Last Word Editors, does just what it says on the cover. There are 114 questions that were asked and answered in the magazine's pages. Many of them made me say "hey, now that's a good question, and I never thought of why that would be."
Unfortunately, though I can see why this would occur, given that the book is already only 230 or so pages long to begin with, there is a fair amount of repetition. One question might get the same answer written three or more different ways, which gets monotonous after a while. There are also the answers that strive (and fail) to be amusing, such as the wag who answered the question of why we veer to the left when we're drunk by stating that we've spent all our money and thus our right-hand pocket is emptier by the end of the night. Yawn.
This is the kind of book that my Dad might have called a "bathroom reader;" it's perfect to dip in and out of for a few minutes at a time. I don't suggest that you attempt reading it as I did, as a dedicated, beginning-to-end read, because that just induced the question of "how many pages are left to read in this thing?"
Unfortunately, though I can see why this would occur, given that the book is already only 230 or so pages long to begin with, there is a fair amount of repetition. One question might get the same answer written three or more different ways, which gets monotonous after a while. There are also the answers that strive (and fail) to be amusing, such as the wag who answered the question of why we veer to the left when we're drunk by stating that we've spent all our money and thus our right-hand pocket is emptier by the end of the night. Yawn.
This is the kind of book that my Dad might have called a "bathroom reader;" it's perfect to dip in and out of for a few minutes at a time. I don't suggest that you attempt reading it as I did, as a dedicated, beginning-to-end read, because that just induced the question of "how many pages are left to read in this thing?"
March 22, 2026
Great fun. This book encourages us to be more curious and to show how science can answers some very interesting practical questions. It makes science more accessible and 'useful?' particularly for young people.
I detest the pseudo-intellectual pretentious academics who flooded you tube and other media making cash out of trying to replace philosophy with 'science'. These fakes came crashing down after the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope exposed them. The big bang became the small whimper. It was a total scam. (Sorry I am on my soap box here). Yeh...mathematical equations through physics can explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. There is more truth in 'The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy'. Boy I hate those guys. Now deep breath.
So this lovely gentle book is a welcome change from the hype. Science can be real and practical.
BTW...spoiler alert...the answer is 'Penguins can control the blood flow...and send warm blood to their feet at a temperature just high enough to avoid frostbite 1-2 degrees Celsius -plus there is an exothermic reaction due to hemoglobins in the blood but I don't understand much of that.
Get your kids to read this.
I detest the pseudo-intellectual pretentious academics who flooded you tube and other media making cash out of trying to replace philosophy with 'science'. These fakes came crashing down after the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope exposed them. The big bang became the small whimper. It was a total scam. (Sorry I am on my soap box here). Yeh...mathematical equations through physics can explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. There is more truth in 'The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy'. Boy I hate those guys. Now deep breath.
So this lovely gentle book is a welcome change from the hype. Science can be real and practical.
BTW...spoiler alert...the answer is 'Penguins can control the blood flow...and send warm blood to their feet at a temperature just high enough to avoid frostbite 1-2 degrees Celsius -plus there is an exothermic reaction due to hemoglobins in the blood but I don't understand much of that.
Get your kids to read this.
August 9, 2017
Florilège de questions réponses des lecteurs du Magazine The New Scientist. Plutôt qu'un ouvrage de vulgarisation, il s'agit d'une compilation d'articles web avec commentaires plus ou moins argumentés, plus ou moins légitimes selon la compétence des lecteurs répondants. Plusieurs questions suscitent des débats parmi les réponses et au final, on ne sait pas vraiment démêler le vrai du faux, à moins que la vérité ne soit contenue dans cette somme d'avis.
Tantôt drôles, absurdes ou scientifiquement viables, les réponses comme les questions sont intéressantes pour la plupart. Mais si vous cherchez vraiment des réponses à ces questions existentielles telles que : Pourquoi pleure-t-on quand on coupe des oignons ? ou bien encore Pourquoi les oiseaux ne tombent-ils pas quand ils dorment ? vous trouverez ici quelques réponses. Distrayant mais à lire par petites touches pour éviter l'ennui.
Tantôt drôles, absurdes ou scientifiquement viables, les réponses comme les questions sont intéressantes pour la plupart. Mais si vous cherchez vraiment des réponses à ces questions existentielles telles que : Pourquoi pleure-t-on quand on coupe des oignons ? ou bien encore Pourquoi les oiseaux ne tombent-ils pas quand ils dorment ? vous trouverez ici quelques réponses. Distrayant mais à lire par petites touches pour éviter l'ennui.
November 25, 2021
A few interesting concepts, and definitely a trip down memory lane in terms of a lot of they physics. However, the fact of being a bunch of people’s responses means that often you’re reading the same answer multiple times just with one or two words or sentences different. Personally I’d have much preferred if the editor amalgamated the responses into one comprehensive response and then credited all the contributors at the end. Would be great for a teen interested in science though; lots of interesting questions but many of the responses do require at least a standard grade/gcse/o level/nat 5/etc understanding of especially physics, and to a lesser extent maths. So probably someone sitting higher/as level/etc. or above would get the most out of it, or someone younger but with an incredibly keenly inquisitive mind who can easily look up and understand several of the concepts.
October 23, 2018
I don't get the point of this book at all. If it was accurate answers to often pondered questions that would be interesting and worth reading but the answers are useless. Because they are submitted by readers of the New Scientist, there are often multiple answers saying the same thing. Bizarrely the person who collated the book includes all of them so you end up reading the same explanation several times. Or worse, someone else contradicts the first person and both answers are shown with no clarification as to which is correct. Failing either of those two, the answer is some supposedly witty response which is usually not funny and not interesting. This is just a terrible book and was clearly only published to be a money spinner for the New Scientist.
February 8, 2019
This book was pretty mediocre. Half of it was pretty facinating, answering a bunch of questions that I think we’ve all asked. Stuff like “why does a tea kettle whistle” or “how does a gun silencer work,” which is pretty interesting. The other half of the book was hearing the same answer, just reworded in a different way. Some times they didn’t even answer the question. It felt like they just tried to say I “don’t know” in the most complicated way possible. Other then this, the answers that were given were pretty good and easy to understand. I feel like the author could have sorted out the answers to the questions a little bit more, but other then that, this book was pretty good.
February 16, 2021
Ogromne rozczarowanie. Oczekiwałam lekkiej aczkolwiek pouczającej lektury. Okładka, opis oraz chwytliwe hasło "bestseller" obiecywało bowiem odpowiedzi na dość niecodzienne pytania podane w formie przystępnej dla każdego czytelnika a także okraszone sporą dawką dobrego humoru. Nic bardziej mylnego. Już dawno tak bardzo nie zmuszałam się do ukończenia jakiejś książki. Przebrnięcie przez nią było prawdziwą mordęgą. Nie lubię niestety pozostawiać książek nieskończonych. Dla osoby nie posiadającej fizycznego czy też chemicznego wykształcenia wykraczającego poza liceum jest to w większości przypadków naukowy bełkot, z rozrywką niemający wiele wspólnego.
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