Letters archive

The article by Ros Herman on the virtues of Lego as a practical teaching medium ('The stuff that dreams are made of', Forum, 12 May) brings to mind an earlier time when school children satisfied their mechanical dreams with Meccano. Meccano had, however, another useful attribute. Its range of gears, shafts, bearings, pulleys and structural …

If taken at face value, the caption to the final graph in your admirable 'Risky business' (Inside Science, number 33, 19 May) would lead your readers to conclude that food irradiation is many times more risky than mountain climbing, and microwave ovens are deadlier than motor vehicles. In fact, the caption is wrong. What the …

We would like to reply to your review of our book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and the Future (Review, 27 January). The book was written for the lay reader, and offers a new view of the evolutionary process, ranging well beyond the confines of the current neo-Darwinist paradigm. The 'driving force' is the environment …

I was interested in the comments from Ian Fallon, of the National Rivers Authority, about the Thames Barrier (Letters, 26 May). If sea levels rise by 30 centimetres, how much will this reduce the '1-in-1000' chance of the Thames Barrier being overtopped? If it comes down below 1-in-100 years, it is certainly time to worry. …

How 'idyllic' is the life of the typical male lamb, when a tight rubber band applied by the farmer to its scrotum causes its testicles to drop off from gangrene? As a farmer, Jennifer Rees ('Let them eat meat', Forum, 19 May) should be better informed (even if she has not heard of the Australian …

Far from being 'an unexpected new tool for predicting earthquakes', the emission of radio waves during seismic activity is a well known phenomenon which has been actively investigated since the widespread radio disturbances caused by the great Chilean earthquake of 1960 ('On shaky ground', 12 May). The problems today lie not in detecting seismo-electromagnetic effects …

'Electrons switch on to heavy metal', 19 May, was a valiant and overall a successful attempt to give a flavour of the heavy fermion materials. However, as well as correcting the name of Zachary Fisk, I must point out that the discovery of heavy fermion materials did not emerge from a search for new superconductors …

As an asthmatic and a fellow Glaswegian (although one who thoroughly enjoys the informative yet fun-to-read articles in New Scientist, of which Harvey and May's on asthma and mites, 3 March, was a superb example), I have only two words for Dr Colloff who took offence at the manner in which the subject was treated …

Paul Harrison's excellent article tends to oversimplify the 'neo- Malthusian' position ('Too much life on Earth?', 19 May). Population Concern, the UK organisation prominent in this field, would endorse most of his arguments. We would certainly not claim that population growth is responsible for most of the developing world's ills, but we do say that …

One reason why experiments using pornography are far less dangerous than Maggie Sinclair thinks (Letters, 19 May) is that to get any measurable aggression at all in the laboratory, subjects must be hurt by a confederate of the experimenter before exposure to the sexual materials. But superficial reviews of complex fields like this are dangerous …