My husband absolutely loves little books of facts and I'm constantly on the look out for books that I think he will like. I'm quite the opposite and while I like the odd fact now and then, I much prefer to read a story, however, recently, my new pre-order novel from Amazon hadn't arrived and looking through the bookcase the only books I hadn't read were my husbands. I decided to give this one a try, mainly because I'm a girl and was intrigued whether or not polar boys do actually get lonely (or maybe I'm just weird!)! I took this book to bed with me and rather than tucking myself up and digging my nose into a novel, I filled myself full of intriguing science questions instead!

This book was published by New Scientist Magazine and gave the facts authenticity allowing you to believe the facts. New Scientist has a 'Last Word' column which offers readers the opportunity to provide questions from readers and also allow readers to answer the questions. The book offers 'another dazzling mixture of serious enquiry, brilliant insight and the hilariously unexpected'. This book is the third in the collection of the 'Last Word' column following Does Anything Eat Wasps and Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?

Each question has roughly a page to provide its answer and at the end of the answer is the name and the location of the contributor and in some cases (perhaps to provide validity to their answer) their job such as 'Senior Lecturer in Engineering at Cambridge University - In this case the lecturer had provided quite a complex but seemingly accurate answer as to how much force would be required to stop the Earth from spinning!

The questions range from the serious to the strange quite quickly and you can have Why do some flowers close at night? What is the evolutionary advantage if doing this and why do only some plants bother to do so? Immediately followed by How long would it take an average cow to fill the Grand Canyon with milk? A question which I'm sure plays on the mind of all of us (!?).

The book divides questions into 9 sections and the sections include:

Food and drink

Domestic science

Our bodies

Feeling OK?

Plants and animals

Our planet, our universe

Troublesome transport

Weird weather

Best of the rest

My absolute favourite question is the very last in the book and causes a few different answers. Just to get your mind thinking, the question is: I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents and so on. If I drew a family tree going back 10 generations, I would expect to see a line of 1024 ancestors. At 30 generations I would expect to see a line of over a billion ancestors. If I tried to research my family back 40 generations (about 100 years) I would be searching for the names of vastly more people than have ever lived. This is impossible of course, so what is wrong with my reasoning?

I love this question as it is in my opinion exactly what the whole book is about - different ideas and contradictions in thoughts among readers. This really is a fascinating book and while some questions may not interest you in the slightest, on the next page you may find a question which you have always wondered about too, and the answer will be there for you! Filled with seriousness, giggle and lots of opportunity to get you thinking!

I picked this up in a pound shop for you guessed it - a £1, but you can pick this up for £5.39 from Amazon for the paperback version or £2.69 for the Kindle edition. The RRP is £7.99.