Every year, readers send in thousands of questions to New Scientist, a 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 compilation of the best queries that have appeared in the magazine. The book contains 101 such questions. Among the favourite questions were how long you could survive on beer alone, how fat you’d need to be to be bullet proof, how to get bubbles evenly distributed in Aero bars and this musing: “What would be the effect on the Earth if an alien spaceship came along and dragged the moon away?”

Apart from the fascinating quirkiness of the questions, what are set to charm and amuse the readers are the responses sent by experts all around the world to explain the questions submitted. It is amazing to know how people know stuff like the chemical composition of spinach and how willing many of them were to test and experiment on behalf of helping someone else out.

The book seems to be a fascinating read for non-scientists and scientists alike.