Customer Reviews

The Last Word: Questions and Answers from the Popular Column on Everyday Science (New Scientist) (Vol 1)

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New Scientist is one of the best science magazines available, and "The Last Word" is its most popular section.

As it says in the introduction, there are big mysteries and little mysteries. This book is devoted to the little mysteries, as celebrated in New Scientist magazine's "The Last Word" column, where readers send in their questions and other readers answer. So here you can find out things from why the sky is blue to why ice cubes have little bubbles toward the middle to why fingertips wrinkle when they've been in water too long. I was particularly interested to learn that hot water really does freeze faster than cold water (and why), something I had regarded as an urban legend. Interesting reading and probably a great bathroom book.

A random selection of readers' questions to New Scientist magazine together with other readers' responses. I found a number of everyday queries to which I had long lacked an answer: why do onions make your eyes water? If heat rises how come it's cold on top of a mountain? Plus others which had never occurred to me before: why is a mirror image back to front but not upside down? If the moon's just a bit of rock how come it's perfectly round?