(FORTUNE Magazine) – Okay, science-phobes, try this: Pour a little liqueur, say Tia Maria, into a glass and top it with a thin layer of cream. Watch closely. The cream will break up into what looks like small writhing doughnuts. If you find yourself watching in fascination instead of just sipping, then you clearly have what it takes for science: a lively inner 10-year-old.

That ignored young self has doubtless struggled for years to bring mysteries to your attention: Since mirrors reverse things, why don't they turn them upside down too? Why is it hard to tickle ourselves? Do you stay drier in the rain if you run for it? Does beheading hurt--and if so, how long is the severed head aware of its plight?

If you've let those burning issues turn to ashes at back of your hippocampus, that's bad--it hastens the onset of senility. The simple remedy: Dose up regularly on The Last Word.

TLW is a superlatively quirky Q&A that appears each week on the last page of New Scientist magazine. New Scientist, in case you've missed it, is a spunky British rag that might be described as the Playboy of the promiscuously curious--no baffling phenomenon or buzz in the lab escapes its wide-eyed attention. TLW, to extend the metaphor, is New Scientist's centerfold--the part that's nearly impossible to resist turning to first.

The magazine modestly describes the Q&A's purview as everyday science. Actually it covers the human experience like hurled quicksilver, strewing little globules of bright insight. TLW has grappled with all the puzzles noted above, including the Tia Maria effect, sent in by readers around the world. Here's a favorite TLW koan: When a fly runs head-on into a locomotive, it must be stationary for a split second as its smashed body reverses direction. So doesn't that mean the train must also stop during that teensy moment, ever so briefly halted by the impact?

TLW's far-flung fans have happily supplied a trove of answers to such conundrums. Check it out at www.newscientist.com--it's like an endless party at which a gaggle of learned, semi-sloshed Oxford professors try to outdo one another. Each week the magazine publishes the best answers that 25 quid can buy (the reward for contributors whose answers get printed) to queries tossed out in earlier TLWs.

The column's editor, Mick O'Hare, 38, a genial Yorkshireman with a penchant for enigmas involving alcoholic beverages, picks the best Q's and A's from the hundreds that pile up on his desk in London. O'Hare relies on colleagues to help answer real stumpers, and in a pinch he conducts his own studies with a single subject. (He's the subject, of course.) When a reader recently asked how much the human head weighed--a topic science has somehow neglected--he filled a big bucket with water, stuck his head in, captured the overflow, measured its volume, and from that calculated its weight. That gives a reasonable approximation, because heads, like the rest of us, are mostly water. Mick's, by the way, weighs in at a respectable 9.4 pounds.

TLW's strong pull has brought big names into its orbit, including avant-garde artist Brian Eno, the late Stephen Jay Gould, and Arthur C. Clarke. But the best submissions have come from little-known people blessed with insistent inner kids. Perhaps the most entrancing question ever was posed by Tanzania's Erasto Mpemba, who, while making ice cream one day, was astonished to discover that the creamy mixture freezes faster when it's hot than when it's cool. The "Mpemba effect," as this strange phenomenon is now called in physics literature, has never been definitively explained--it has been debated since New Scientist first noted it in 1969, and it recently inspired yet another classic brawl of the boffins in TLW. Here's another that O'Hare says he has waited years for someone to dispense with: How do schools of fish suddenly turn in unison?

TLW's most prolific answerer by far is one Jon Richfield, a retired computer scientist in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He e-mailed me that his first reaction to TLW's riddles is often "No clue!" or "Who cares?" Then "the next thing you know, it's 'Oh, well, let's have a go.'" This has happened about 300 times.

Identifying TLW's best-ever answers is nearly impossible--each week it seems there's yet another weirdly engaging trivial pursuit. Some factoids from recent issues: The question mark, which dates from the Middle Ages, used to be tilted forward at about a 45-degree angle to convey the rising intonation of a question. We twist and turn about 100 times a night when we sleep but don't fall out of bed because we never turn nose down (makes sense), hence are in no danger of rolling over and over. Beer kegs have curved walls in part to make them easier to roll down sloping ramps into bar basements--the shape makes them self-correct if they begin rolling offline, unlike cylindrical containers.

Identifying TLW's strangest revelations is easier--the list would have to include the ones on the beheading question. In case you're squeamish, though, we'd best not go into them.

Oh, all right. One contributor noted that Antoine Lavoisier, a brilliant chemist who was guillotined during the French Revolution, reportedly asked friends to observe closely as he was executed, for as a last service to science he would continue blinking as long as he could after decapitation. He supposedly did so for 15 seconds. This macabre anecdote has never been confirmed. But an even more horrible investigation, cited in TLW, made it seem plausible. We'd better skip it for now--I just heard your inner mommy calling. Or was that my editor?

Maybe you should get back to your Tia Maria, anyway. The eerie little doughnut shapes that roil its creamy surface were first noted in TLW in 1995. A few weeks ago an international team of physicists, after what must have been countless empirical studies, finally explained it: The effect, they soberly informed TLW, is caused by Benard-Marangoni convection, a process in which a fluid of high surface tension (the cream) flees areas of low surface tension (produced by alcohol diffusing into the cream). This TLW-inspired breakthrough won't win a Nobel Prize. But as you raise your Benard-Marangoni apparatus to your lips, consider: Hard science has never gone down so well.