The Things That Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything

Should you buy for your library a book with hundreds of questions to which no one knows the answer? If so, you should consider this clever and wry compendium, written by the ever-curious mathematician, writer, and psychologist Hartston. He's already done several similar, well-researched collections of seemingly "useless information." Yet these are the mysteries that could keep readers up at night—puzzling over information they didn't know that they didn't know. Confused? Well, it's that celebration of ignorance that makes this book both so much fun and such a conversation starter. While some topics and questions are quite obscure, there is plenty here to please any trivia enthusiast, scientific wonderer, or just the innocently ignorant (or, as it were, perpetually curious). Covering from aardvarks (do you share their DNA?) to zymology (much ado about yeast), the book takes a scientific look at a plethora of stuff you may never need to know, but once you scan the scintillating questions, you'll want to know more. In the midst of all our knowledge and education, how did we manage to overlook some of these questions—What was the origin of laughter? Who destroyed the nose of the Sphinx? Why are so many female albatrosses lesbian? Topics from the curious (sex, sports, religion) to the mundane (plankton, coffee, hair) are here—and Hartston provides humorous tidbits of historical information about each—piquing our interest but, alas, revealing that the real answer is…there is no answer.