Letters archive

P. W. Agnew criticises the use of gas for electricity generation at Ballylumford power station as being a scandalous and inefficient misuse of gas (Letters, December 23/30). I should like to make a number of points in response to this criticism. The conversion to natural gas firing was a condition of British Gas's purchase of …

Your article describes a proposal by Japanese researchers to improve the desert tolerance of plants by giving them the gene for a more efficient form of the CO 2 -fixing enzyme RuBisCo (Technology, 20 January). This gives credence to a naive proposal that is very unlikely to work. Despite the support given in many biochemistry …

I am surprised that Alasdair Beal persists in an argument that was more than adequately demolished by Tom Nash and Jeremy Henty (Letters, 18 November and 23/30 December). The main point that Beal misses is that Herbert Dingle's idea of swapping the roles of the two clocks to infer a paradox is just plain wrong. …

The observations by J. R. Catlin on the behaviour of small flies in his bungalow struck a chord (Letters, 6 January). I have been similarly plagued by these beastly little monsters in my top-floor flat. I have not tested their taste buds with brandy but have observed that they prefer red wine to white. They …

So the Québecois butiner on the Internet instead of surfing (Feedback, 6 January). Butiner, however, means to gather nectar, the work that bees do. I suspect that bees would be offended if their activities were described as "plundering". If the French butiner on the Internet, the image is that of the bee that goes from …

I believe Kishor Bhagwati does not have the correct version of the Rutherford-Haber encounter (Letters, 6 January), Isaac Asimov, quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous remark, once wrote that Haber was the first scientist to "know sin" through his development of poison gas in the First World War. As my own father's life was shortened by …

The phenomenon of vibrations when you draw your finger or some other sensitive part of your body over nonearthed electrical devices connected to the mains is clearly electrostatic, because it does not require the appliance to be metallic (Letters, 2 December and 13 January). It occurs strongly on the outside of ceramic "electric jugs" filled …

Gail Vines claims "the diversity of human language was probably at its peak 15 000 years ago, when some 10 000 languages were spoken" ("Death of a mother tongue", 6 January). She also claims there are currently some 6000 languages spoken in the world. While any such figures must depend on the criteria used to …

I am astonished the rumoured cutbacks at the British Library have not aroused the scientific community in both academia and industry (This Week, 13 January). From my own industrial standpoint, the axing of a third of the journals taken by the British Library's Science Reference and Information Service (SRIS) in London could have serious effects. …

I would be interested to know the views of other readers on the issue of commercial sponsorship of learned societies. As reported in the press last month, the Royal Geographical Society is embroiled in a controversy because of the £40 000 annual sponsorship it receives from Shell. A heated debate took place at the society's …

Reg Dennick claims it is time that Lewis Wolpert is "challenged to expand his narrow definition of what constitutes science" (Letters, 13 January). However, I would support Wolpert in his assertion that science is a product of European thought and culture, though its results and methods are available to all. Other cultures, such as Chinese …