By Jay Ingram
Ever ask yourself why onions make you cry? Or why lizards do pushups? Or why leaves switch colour within the fall?
Don’t fear, you’re no longer on my own. Acclaimed technological know-how author and broadcaster Jay Ingram wonders an identical issues. After a protracted profession of asking vital questions (Does time accelerate as we age? How a lot Neanderthal is in me? Why do a little animals throw their feces?), he’s the following to place our medical quandaries to relaxation. during this insightful, witty ebook for curious readers of every age, Jay stocks his favourite head-scratchers and mind-benders, settling urgent questions, such as...
-What is déjà vu?
-Why have been Tyrannosaurus Rex’s hands so short?
-Why are you suffering from mosquitoes whereas your folks aren’t?
-Does your cat really like you?*
-What is déjà vu?
...along with every thing you ever puzzled approximately human echolocation, Bigfoot and farts (though now not all at once).
Whimsically illustrated and chock-full of enjoyable technological know-how proof (and fictions), this ebook will satisfaction and shock your internal technology geek.
*SPOILER: She really thinks you’re a bigger, dumber model of her mom.
Read or Download The Science of Why: Answers to Questions About the World Around Us PDF
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Extra info for The Science of Why: Answers to Questions About the World Around Us
Sample text
Because you’re doing two things at once, you fail at your main task. The third theory suggests that overarousal and overstimulation, especially in extreme situations—such as competing for an Olympic medal—make people unable to perform at peak levels. Excess energy has nowhere to go, according to this theory, and the result is a lack of focus. Sian Beilock at the University of Chicago has tried to make sense of the third theory by actually studying putters. She set out to see if putters were most likely to choke when they allowed their conscious mind to intrude at the very worst time.
The Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers, and so they had to go where the food was. Evidence of the Neanderthal diet is gleaned from chemical analysis of micro-traces of food left behind in the plaque on fossilized teeth. Neanderthals consumed a wide-ranging diet that was dominated by meat—there are butchered animal bones aplenty wherever their remains have been found—but that also included vegetables. Chemical analysis of a famous Neanderthal skeleton from Saint-Césaire, France, suggested that he and his cohort ate fewer reindeer and more woolly rhinos or mammoths than did their main competitors, hyenas.
As we’ve just seen, earlier experiments had shown that there’s a wide range of sensitivity to the smell—to some people, the stench is overpowering, whereas others don’t notice it at all. Knowing that, the scientists in the most recent experiment concluded that there couldn’t be a single asparagus smell. Rather, there must be a variety of odors, each one as different as the person who produces it. That has yet to be tested, though—it’s hard enough to persuade volunteers to sniff urine at all, let alone to judge its quality.