Does Anything Eat Wasps? [antikvár]

Introduction When, in 1994, New Scientist began publishing The Last Word, the magazine's weekly column of everyday science questions and answers provided by readers, one of the journal's editors asked how long we expected the column to rim. Estimates ranged from twelve months to five years. 'If,' suggested one, 'we reach ten years, I'd be amazed. That would be more than five hundred weeks of questions - there simply aren't that many out there.' Eleven years later you are reading Does Anything Eat Wasps?, a witty and sometimes esoteric compilation of questions and answers from a column that shows no sign of running out of steam. In the last five years alone, readers have told us how fat you have to be to become bulletproof, why dark alcoholic drinks cause heavier hangovers than hght ones, how to judge the amount of rain in a cloud and why eating green potatoes can be downright dangerous. And The Last Word has even spawned a research project and scientific paper in the journal Physica A. So taken were a group of researchers in Spain and the USA by our question asking why Tia Maria and cream interact so dramatically that they set about finding the answer. You can read what they discovered on p. 108. So why has the column thrived against all expectations? Well, as colleagues often tell me, I have the easiest job on the magazine. The Last Word is driven entirely by the enthusiasm of New Scientist's readers. Without their enduring