You don't need a spaceship to travel to the extremes of science. You just need this book.What's the nature of reality? Does the universe ever end? What is time and does it even exist? These are the biggest imagination-stretching, brain-staggering questions in the universe - and here are their fascinating answers.From quantum weirdness to freaky cosmology (like white holes - which spew out matter instead of sucking it in),This Book Will ...

Every year, readers send in thousands of questions to New Scientist, the world's best-selling science weekly, in the hope that the answers to them will be given in the 'Last Word' column - regularly voted the most popular section of the magazine.Does Anything Eat Wasps? is a collection of the best that have appeared, including: Why can't we eat green potatoes? Why do airliners suddenly plummet? Does a compass work in space? Why do all the local dogs howl at emerge...

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 sim...

Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? is the latest 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? - the Christmas 2005 surprise bestseller - this new collection includes recent answers never before published in book form, and also old favourites from the column's early days.Yet again, many seemingly simple questio...

Join New Scientist on a mind-expanding rollercoaster ride through intelligence, creativity, your unconscious and beyond.Congratulations! You're the proud owner of the most complex information processing device in the known universe. The human brain comes equipped with all sorts of useful design features, but also many bugs and weaknesses. Problem is you don't get an owner's manual. You have to just plug and play.As a result, most of us never proper...

Where did we come from? Where are we going?Homo sapiens is the most successful, the most widespread and the most influential species ever to walk the Earth. In the blink of an evolutionary eye we have spread around the globe, taken control of Earth's biological and mineral resources, transformed the environment, discovered the secrets of the universe and travelled into space.Yet just 7 million years ago, we were just another species of great ape mak...

Introduced by Jim Al-Khalili*Could you surf down an erupting volcano?Why do zebras have stripes?Are you breathing the same air as Leonardo da Vinci?Are there any green mammals?Why do pineapples have spikes?Why do songs get stuck in your head?What happens when black holes collide?Can you extract your DNA?*New Scientist has been a treasure trove of fascinating and surprising questions and answer...

Zero, zip, nada, zilch. It's all too easy to ignore the fascinating possibilities of emptiness and non-existence, and we may well wonder what there is to say about nothing. But scientists have known for centuries that nothing is the key to understanding absolutely everything, from why particles have mass to the expansion of the universe; without nothing we'd be precisely nowhere.With chapters by 22 science writers, including top names such as Ian Stewart, Marcus Chown, Helen Pilche...

How can you measure the speed of light with chocolate and a microwave? Why do yo-yos yo-yo? Why does urine smell so peculiar after eating asparagus (includes helpful recipe)? How long does it take to digest different types of food? What is going on when you drop mentos in to cola? 100 wonderful, intriguing and entertaining scientific experiments which show scientific principles first hand - this is science at its most popular.

Sometime in the future the intelligence of machines will exceed that of human brain power. So are we on the edge of an AI-pocalypse, with superintelligent devices superseding humanity, as predicted by Stephen Hawking? Or will this herald a kind of Utopia, with machines doing a far better job at complex tasks than us?You might not realise it, but you interact with AIs every day. They route your phone calls, approve your credit card transactions and help your doctor interpret results...

How did we get here?All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants.We now know that it has taken 3.8 billions of years of work by the forces of evolution to turn what was once a lump of barren rock into the rich diversity of into plants, animals and microbes that surround...

Forget everything you thought you knew about reality.The world is a seriously bizarre place. Things can exist in two places at once and travel backwards and forwards in time. Waves and particles are one and the same, and objects change their behaviour according to whether they are being watched. This is not some alternative universe but the realm of the very small, where quantum mechanics rules. In this weird world of atoms and their constituents, our common sense ...