United States
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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? Plus 107 other questions answered. Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? is the third compilation of readers' answers to the questions in the Last Word column of New Scientist, the world's best-selling science weekly.
Following the phenomenal success of Does Anything Eat Wasps? (2005) and the even more spectacularly successful Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? (2006), this latest collection includes a bumper crop of wise and wonderful answers never before seen in book form. As usual, the simplest questions often have the most complex answers – while some that seem the knottiest have very simple explanations. New Scientist's Last Word is regularly voted the magazine's most popular section as it celebrates all questions – the trivial, idiosyncratic, baffling and strange. This all-new and eagerly awaited selection of the best again presents popular science at its most entertaining and enlightening.
Over 50 years old, New Scientist is the bestselling and fastest growing science magazine in the world, with over 400 000 readers a week in the UK alone. Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? is again compiled and edited by Mick O'Hare, production editor at New Scientist and widely interviewed author of How to Fossilise Your Hamster.
"Following on from the ludicrously popular Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze, this latest collection of strange and intriguing posers from the New Scientist's Last Word column achieves a scientifically improbable feat: it continues to feed the appetite for weird science without seeming to scrape the bottom of the barrel [...] sure to be another Christmas hit"
- Independent
"Why do fingernails grow after death? Why is custard powder pink until you add liquid? And will cracking your knuckles cause long-term harm? These are some of the trivial but intriguing scientific questions posed by inquisitive readers of New Scientist. Now the answers, provided by other well-informed readers, have been collected in a fun book, Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? [...] enlightening"
- Sun
"At last science provides the answers to the world's most pointless questions [...] they're those baffling questions that pop into the brain when you've nothing else to think about, and only the appliance of a large helping of science can answer. Now a new book by the experts at New Scientist magazine solves some of the most intriguing queries sent in by readers"
- Daily Mail
"A fascinating book"
- BBC Focus
"It does have wonderful laughs"
- Sunday Tribune
"It's interesting, it's accurate and it's science without the boring bits [...] if you're thinking of buying it as a present then it's something for the intelligent, thinking reader to keep"
- Bookbag
"This is a perfect stocking filler for the more inquiring mind and is packed with weird and wonderful questions [...] This is a superb collection of general knowledge with a humorous edge that makes this a sure-fire hit this Christmas"
- Bury Free Press
