ASAPScience: Answers to the World's Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, & Unexplained Phenomena
Mitchell Moffit & Greg Brown
ISBN: 9781476756219
Read March 16, 2015
I haven't been reading much lately - between being busy at work and home, and sick as a dog the last two weeks, I've been doing good to put one foot in front of the other. However, I'm feeling better now and what better way to dip my toes back into the lovely world of reading than with a great little book of random science facts.
Sadly, I just read What If. Darnit. If I hadn't, this would have been excellent, but as it is, the answers to the questions were glossy and surface, and don't actually go into the furthest reaches of science and research and related facts of the questions at hand. Which was frustrating for me.
On the one hand, they include several questions that in my opinion they ought to have just left out, or admitted up front are unanswerable because of how they are set up, like "The Chicken or the Egg" which is a question of definitions, or "Which hurts more, childbirth, or being kicked in the nads?" which deals with individual pain tolerances and the differences between sharp instant localized pain and long-term systemic pain - and is therefore unanswerable.
On the other hand, they also have fun questions like "What is brain-freeze" and answer the question without talking about how to fix it (recently studied; firmly press a warm washcloth (or your tongue in a pinch) to the roof of your mouth to force the nerves and blood vessels to re-acclimate to the correct temperature) or "Is binge-watching TV bad for you" by dealing entirely with the physical ramifications of being sedentary and indoors, without addressing the very real social and psychological implications of obsessive or anti-social behavior, both of which have been in the news recently.
That said, several questions are very interesting, and are handled more fully. I enjoyed learning more about the 5-second rule (real deal - anywhere from less than 1 second to more than 20 seconds depending on the surface and how wet the food is), about the disconnect between mirrors and photos of yourself (the key is in the "mirror-image" - and if you tell your phone to reverse the image, you can freak out your friends instead of yourself), and the freaky connection between smells and the potential for a real zombie uprising (nerve connections are weird, y'all.)
Overall, quite fun. For more in-depth treatments, I'd go for What If, but for more mundane curiosity, this book was a fun surface romp through science trivia.
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