Welcome to the latest in New Scientist‘s hugely popular quirky science answers series. As with its predecessors, we have here what ought to be a disaster, as it’s a book made up of a series of columns from newspapers. With a few exceptions, these are, frankly uninspiring books that are very cheap to produce, and it shows. But because the questions are so fascinating, the books culled from the New Scientist‘s Last Word column continue to be a delight.

I think the reason they are so successful is because they tap into the reason human beings are driven to do science. Curiosity. That nagging urge to get an answer to the question ‘Why?’ that drives every conversation with a five year old. As Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory demonstrates, to maintain such a level of questioning into adulthood would be irritating indeed – but it is the residue of that childhood curiosity that thankfully makes us interested in all things scientific.

Without that drive the questions would have become dull after a book or two, but in practice they still keep coming up with crackers, from silly but burning questions like ‘Why do we have earwax?’ to seriously interesting subjects like whether we will ever be able to truly communicate with dolphins and, perhaps most important of all, whether they ever would have got the gold out of the coach in The Italian Job.

The only criticism I have is the means of getting answers. The answers also come from readers writing in. I can see this minimises effort for the editor, and is entertaining for those who write in, but it does mean that some of the answers are a bit questionable. The very first answer, about squeaky cheese gives a suggestion for why we don’t like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard that does not fit with the research I’ve seen. And there is another example where two separate questions appear to have contradictory answers, both of which are accepted by the editor without question. One says ‘Air at a given temperature can only hold a certain amount of water vapour: the colder it is, the less it can hold.’ Fifty pages later we read ‘The belief that warm air can hold more water was disproved in 1802…’ Confusing. Maybe there could be a bit more fact checking.

Despite this slight moan, this remains a solid gold series that will entertain science enthusiasts (who haven’t already read them in the back of New Scientist) everywhere.

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Review by Brian Clegg

New Scientist has done very nicely, thank you, selling 2 million copies of its collections of answers to intriguing science questions derived from the back page of the magazine over the years. Those books were starting to feel just a little jaded, but they have been entirely revived in the latest addition to the series by including photographs. So these are photos readers have sent in of strange phenomena that they want explaining. We get the photo (in shiny colour), the reader’s question, other readers’ responses and a few witty comments from the editor. All in all it works very well.

Apart from the title question, there are strange creatures to be identified, unusual clouds and ice formations to investigate, eggs inside eggs, strange frozen crumpets and more. Very entertaining. It’s not a heavy read – I got through the whole thing on a train journey. I do find I tend to see what the answer is but skip through some of the more nerdy aspects of some replies. I would also say that I got a bit bored with cloud formations. But the exotic wildlife and domestic oddities more than made up for it.

One thing that was interesting – I usually take a quick look at the Last Word section in New Scientist where these Q&As feature. I’ve never remembered anything in the previous books like Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze, but I did remember quite a few of these. It just shows the power of images to fix items more firmly in the memory. Great either to fill in a train journey or as a gift book.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Here we go again with another collection of 114 questions (there’s a title to the next book: Why 114 Questions in these Books?) that first appeared in the ‘Last Word’ section of New Scientist magazine. The format is simple – readers write in with questions, other readers provide answers, the best of which are published. The books contain the question, selected good answers and sometimes editorial comment.

I loved the earlier Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?, and still got a lot out of the experiment-oriented How to Fossilize your Hamster. But I did comment in the Hamster review: ‘These books have been great but they aren’t really decent popular science books as they don’t have any narrative flow. The approach has been milked to death now – let’s see something different.’ I unfortunately did get a sense of diminishing returns this time around. Enough, already.

I’m not saying that some of the questions and answers weren’t good. I quite enjoyed, for instance, the title question, which was actually significantly better than the title of the book as ‘Is it true that elephants are the only quadrupeds that cannot jump’. I liked the attempt to work out how long it would take the Earth to freeze if the Sun went out, ‘Is it possible to be too cold to light a fire?’ and ‘Do mosquitoes get malaria?’ But I still had a slight feeling that the barrel was being scraped with many of the items, and increasingly found the replies irritating in their know-it-all way.

Don’t get me wrong, this remains an excellent present for those difficult-to-buy-for people (not for me, thanks, I’ve already got one. And it’s definitely interesting if you haven’t got the previous books (though if you haven’t, I’d go for Penguins’ Feet), but I couldn’t get as excited about this title as the earlier entries in the series.

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Review by Brian Clegg

After a couple of successful books such as Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze spun off from the Last Words column in New Scientist, editor Mick O’ Hare has now turned to the more practical aspects of the questions there, with a whole range of practical experiments to try using mostly household items, and explaining the science behind them. Just occasionally there’s a ‘no you can’t’ where the suggested experiment is an old wives’ tale, which adds to the fun. For me this works even better than Sean Connolly’s Wholly Irresponsible Experiments, because they are much more varied and more oriented to the adult reader (quite a lot seem to involve alcohol).

As for the title, yes, it does kind of tell you how to turn your hamster into a fossil… but the approach is a bit disappointing as it does involve waiting millions of years. There’s even that most famous of DIY experiments – the Mentos in cola fountain – very satisfying.

The only thing I would say is, enough, thank you. These books have been great but they aren’t really decent popular science books as they don’t have any narrative flow. The approach has been milked to death now – let’s see something different. (Oh, and I’m glad to see the US version spells fossilize correctly – shame on you, New Scientist.)

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Review by Brian Clegg

I have to be honest, I started reading this book in a negative frame of mind. It’s yet another book of collections of answers to puzzling, and often slightly strange, science questions, a type of book that is highly enjoyable, so why the negativity? In part it’s the same feeling I had many moons ago when the original Star Wars movie first came out – I didn’t want to like it because it was so hyped. This book was splashed all over the bookshops at Christmas 2006 as a great gift, and that immediately put up the defence antennae. Was this because it was dumbed down, or just over-marketed? No – luckily I was wrong. It’s a collection from the Last Word section of New Scientist magazine, and works wonderfully well. The questions are interesting, the answers a mix of the erudite and amusing, and only occasionally stray into dull pedantry.

The format is a question posed by a reader followed by one or more (sometimes two or three) answers from other readers, with the occasional remark from the editor to clarify what was being said. Sometimes, often the best bits, one of the multiple replies will take a rather different and witty line. The title question of the book has to be one of the least interesting, but amongst my favourites were those on double yolks, breathing Leonardo da Vinci’s breath, and the dangers of firing guns into the air. I also have to mention one about cars’ steering tending to centre itself, not so much because the subject was fascinating as I was surprised to see a question from someone I knew (not, as you might imagine from the science community, but a novelist).

Having dismissed my original negative outlook I do have one small gripe – Last Word has never published anything I’ve sent in (so is clearly lacking discernment). I do still feel slighted on two points. First they ignored a brilliant question. If we say something is black in colour when it doesn’t reflect any colours of light, what colour is something that’s shiny black? This is, if I say so myself, a question that is deeper than it first seems. Secondly, and more interesting in this context, was an answer I sent to a question that makes it into the book. The reader’s question asks how it is possible for both Grolsch lager (which claims to have better flavour because it’s matured in the bottle) and Budweiser (which claims to have better flavour because it’s rushed from bottling to consumption) to be correct in their claims. The published answers concentrate on the brewing process and the chemical reactions underlying it. My answer was: “In The Last Word (29 October) Mick McCarthy asked for a scientific answer to the question of which tastes better, Budweiser or Grolsch. No doubt he will receive plenty of deeply thought out technical responses, but surely the answer ought to be ‘You should get out more!’ Anyone who really needs to ask New Scientist which of two lagers is better, is long overdue a little outing to the pub.” -which I still feel beats anything that was published (though to be fair to editor Mick O’Hare, we did have a little discussion of the problem, he didn’t just ignore me).

Overall, then, one of the better additions to the “fun science Q&A” genre, and well worth reading.

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Review by Brian Clegg