What if? 2 : additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions 2 :

A follow-up to xkcd cartoonist Munroe's best-seller What If?, this second volume continues answering science questions from readers around the world. Most of the questions are ridiculous but the answers are very serious. How many humans would a T. rex need to consume to get its needed calories? What would happen if Earth's rotation sped up to make a day last one second? If you rolled a snowball from the top of Mount Everest, how big would it be by the time it reached the bottom? Munroe breaks down these questions and does the research to actually answer them. Part of the fun is how he breaks down the components of the question to arrive at an answer. Wil Wheaton has the cred to narrate this as it should be read. He takes each question as seriously as Monroe, but adds sly, tongue-in-cheek highlights to make listening an absolute pleasure. The print version does include some cartoons, but the audio is a treasure of its own. VERDICT Libraries who serve any nerds should snap up this gem. Great on its own, and also a wonderful accompaniment to the print version of Munroe's delightful book.--Christa Van Herreweghe

Former NASA roboticist Munroe continues his quest to answer the world's unlikeliest questions. Assuming you had enough fuel, how long would it take you to drive to the edge of the observable universe? If you traveled at 65 mph, writes the author, "it will take you 480,000,000,000,000,000 years…to get there, or 35 million times the current age of the universe." How Munroe arrives at such calculations isn't always clear, and his math doesn't always show the work, but roll with it. He estimates that a hungry T. rex set loose on the streets of New York might be placated with 80 hamburgers--and if the dinosaur decides to devour a friend of yours instead of the proffered treat, "anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers." Speaking of eating, can a person eat a cloud? No, writes the author, not unless you can squeeze the air out of it, and never mind whether the water within the cloud is potable. Munroe takes clear delight in his odd investigations--e.g., whether a person--or a vampire, maybe--can get drunk drinking a drunk person's blood. The answer has to do with the dilution of ethanol, but Munroe pauses to counsel that it's a very bad idea to drink someone else's blood in the first instance: "I'm not a doctor, and I try not to give medical advice in my books. However, I will confidently say that you shouldn't drink the blood of someone with a viral hemorrhagic fever." You've got to like a book that blends deep dives into such matters as the nature of black holes and the mathematics of genealogy with handy pop-culture references--as when Munroe brightly likens the unfortunate Greek king Sisyphus to Hollywood stalwart Dwayne Johnson, because, of course, rocks are involved in both cases. A delight for science geeks with a penchant for oddball thought experiments. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.