Sherry Seethaler - Curious Folks Ask: 162 Real Answers on Amazing Inventions, Fascinating Products, and Medical Mysteries

What are you curious about? What have you always wondered about? For more than five years, renowned science and health writer Dr. Sherry Seethaler has been answering questions like yours in her weekly column in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Now she's brought together 162 of the best questions and answers in a book you won't be able to put down.

Seethaler is one of this generation's best science explainers, and it shows: Every answer is accurate, fun to read, and distilled to a single page or less!

Want to know how canned air works... or nuclear bombs? What causes goose bumps, earwax, dandruff, headaches? Whether it's healthy to crack your knuckles, drink decaf, eat chocolate? What it costs to run all those LED lights around your house? It's all hereand a whole lot more!

Surprising facts about how your body grows and works

The past, present, and future of our relentless human inventiveness

How they keep outsmarting us, and why it's so hard to stay healthy

The science behind the everyday products that have transformed our lives

New lessons from genetics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology

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162 Real Answers on Amazing Inventions, Fascinating Products, and Medical Mysteries

Sherry Seethaler

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First Printing February 2010

ISBN-10: 0-13-705738-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-705738-2

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For everyone who has ever wondered

I am tremendously grateful for my wonderful agent, Jodie Rhodes, the vision and hard work of the FT Press Science team, and everyone responsible for the Quest section of the San Diego Union-Tribune , especially my three editors: Leigh Fenly, Margaret King, and Scott LaFee. Of course, Curious Folks Ask would not have been possible without the curious folks who asked the questions that have taught me so much over the years. No matter how quickly the days pass, or how busy they seem to be, may we all find time each day to wonder.

Sherry Seethaler is a science writer and educator at the University of California, San Diego. She works with scientists to communicate their discoveries to the public. She also writes a weekly column for the San Diego Union-Tribune in which she answers readers questions spanning nearly every imaginable science topic. She earned a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of Toronto, a Master of Science and a Master of Philosophy in biology from Yale University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in science and mathematics education from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Lies, Damned Lies, and Science (FT Press Science, 2009). It serves as a guide and set of tools for making sense of the health and science-related issues we encounter in our daily lives.

Inquiring minds want to know. Whats the big deal about low-carb diets? What causes muscle aches when you get the flu? How did the ancient Egyptians build the Giza Pyramids? Does it matter what brand of gasoline you buy? Could adult stem cells have as much promise as embryonic stem cells? Is a horsepower really the power of one horse? Does chocolate cause acne? What makes glue sticky? How is it possible to design bifocal contact lenses? What causes dandruff?

And sometimes, inquiring minds ask questions that other inquiring minds did not even realize they wanted to know. Why do we get skin cancer from sun-damaged skin when damaged cells are continually sloughing off and being replaced? What causes out-of-body experiences? Is the Star Wars lightsaber possible? Are there beneficial viruses, just as there are beneficial bacteria? Why do some people have second toes that are longer than their big toes? Is increased environmental noise leading to increased violence? With their unwieldy number system, how did the ancient Romans engineer their magnificent buildings?

These are some of the 162 questions compiled in this science Q&A anthology. The questions come from real people who range in age from high schoolers to octogenarians (and probably even younger and older folks too). Some of them are scientists, and others tell me, Im not a science person, but Ive always wanted to know What they share is a deep curiosity about the world around them. The questions and answers in Curious Folks Ask can rekindle the natural wonder about science and the world around us that we all shared as children but that frequently gets pushed aside in formal education settings.

Since I began writing a weekly science Q&A for the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2004, not a week has gone by that I havent learned something surprising from answering readers questions. People often ask me if I know the answers off the top of my head. Sometimes I do, or think I do, but I extensively research each answer because, after all, science is constantly progressing. There is always something newperhaps a different way of thinking about things, a controversy where none was evident initially, or a myth that has masqueraded as the truth for so long that many well-informed people have been fooled.

For example, the notion that getting chilled can cause one to catch a cold is dismissed as an old wives tale by many usually reliable sources. However, a careful search of the peer-reviewed scientific literature turns up a more interesting story, which is revealed in the first Q&A in . This illustrates a unique feature of Curious Folks Ask . The concise, palatable answers highlight not just what is known, but also where gaps in scientific understanding exist. Perhaps these mysteries will even inspire a young reader or two to take up the torch and begin a journey into scientific research.