How did the Romans express fractions? Why do some shellfish turn red when cooked? Why have humans developed different blood types and is there an evolutionary advantage? Why does freshly fallen snow squeak and creak when you step on it? When will Mount Everest cease to be the tallest mountain on the planet? Why do we sometimes get a tune or refrain stuck in our heads, and play it over and over again, even though it's driving us crazy?
Amateur experts have spent years answering just these sorts of intriguing questions in the pages of the weekly U.K.-based popular science magazine New Scientist. Their Last Word q&a column prints readers' (usually somewhat offbeat) questions and invites other readers to answer. Readers, some scientists, some not, write in with their own explanations and anecdotes, or respond to other answers they found lacking. Know It All: 132 Head-Scratching Questions About the Science All Around Us follows, among others, Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? as another "best of" Last Word collection.
Know It All is an entertaining and intellectually stimulating read, probably most enjoyable in short bursts or opened to a random page. The book has two major conflicting downsides: the "authors" often lack any credentials beyond their own apparent scientific knowledge, and the answers occasionally become esoteric quagmires, making Know It All at once too rudimentary for some audiences and too advanced for others. Still, it should appeal to a middle ground of readers with general science interest. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer