Customer Reviews

Enjoyable enough read but peppered with inaccuracies - By: D. T. E. Gosnell, 25 Jan 2007
It's a perfectly fun book to dip into & easy enough to read, but there are too many factual errors, evidence of lack of proof-reading & generally simply not answering the questions, for a pedantic scientist to be able to entirely enjoy it.

Examples:
- claiming nettles sting with formic acid
- confusing galaxies with the universe
- claiming the distant planet Sedna is a mere 10 million miles from the Sun
- determining fingernail growth of 0.5mm/week to be 2.16mm/month, ignoring significant figures

Ultimately it mainly does what it says on the tinin terms of its recycling of the source material, but that source material really should have been checked better.