Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives

Do spiders get thirsty? How long would it take a cow to fill the Grand Canyon with milk? How do they get the stripes on toothpaste? This title answers these questions.

A compilation of readers' answers to the questions in the 'Last Word' column of New Scientist , one of the world's best-selling science weekly.

Following the success of Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? , this work looks at scientific conundrums that can be answered by simple experiments which can be done at home and enjoyed by the armchair scientist.

Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.

Shows how our flawed strategies for perceiving risk influence our lives, often with unforeseen and sometimes - tragic consequences. This book uncovers one of the central puzzles of our time: why are the safest people in history living in a culture of fear?

Unless we are brilliant at science in our teenage years, many of us put off 'childish things' - science museums, palaeontology - in favour of museums, art galleries and concert halls. The author argues that a cultured person should know about the classic ideas of physics and biology as well as the classic works of Beethoven and Picasso.

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.

An entertaining collection of history's some of the most bizarre experiments, from the 19th-century creation of zombie kittens to a University of Wisconsin study that answers, definitively, the question of whether women who play hard to get really are more desirable.

Did you know that there's so much empty space inside matter that the entire human race could be squeezed into the volume of a sugar cube? Or that you grow old more quickly on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor? This book is a science book discussing such questions.

The 30th anniversary edition of the million copy international bestseller, with a new introduction from the author. As relevant and influential today as when it was first published, this classic exposition of evolutionary thought, widely hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, stimulated whole new areas of research.