Letters archive

by e-mail Kurt Kleiner underestimates the damage that a few misguided and foolish individuals could cause to the World Wide Web ( "Surfing prohibited", 25 January, p 28 ). Linking is the fundamental underlying philosophy of the Web and what makes it such a powerful information resource. Remove the ability to link freely and the …

Los Angeles A hyperlink is not analogous to a library catalogue card, it's analogous to a footnote or endnote reference. If you take that analogy, you avoid all of the problems with linking to copyrighted material. No one is required to get the permission of the copyright holder to reference his material in a publication. …

Bath There is little point in using laws in this area. The idea makes about as much sense as passing laws against computer viruses, antisocial though these are (just count the prosecutions). The only sensible scheme is for authors themselves to control who gets to see what they write using strong encryption ( "Psst . …

Glasgow You report that large commercial organisations wish to ban use of their World Wide Web addresses, barring explicit permission. Of course, none of these companies would ever consider using, or, even worse, buying and selling, my physical address without my explicit permission. Which leaves an interesting question: how come I still get junk mail?

Southend, Essex . . . and good riddance, it seems. Does it matter when we disperse at auction a major archive of scientific and technical papers, photographs and historic artefacts encapsulating the very origins of a major science-led industry? Some might think not, but that is exactly what GEC will shortly do with the complete …

Conwy, North Wales I read with interest the article about our possible sixth sense ( "The sixth sense", 25 January, p 36 ). It has always fascinated me that women living closely together eventually synchronise their menstrual cycles. Could the vomeronasal organ mediate this phenomenon, I wonder? If so, the implications could be interesting, and …

Braintree, Essex What worries me, as a primary school teacher, is that we still teach children that there are seven colours in a rainbow, and that we have five senses. It's as though we had no sense of temperature (spread widely through our bodies, like touch) or balance (in an identifiable organ, like hearing or …

Liverpool Barry Fox has outlined ways in which callers can abuse telephone polling systems, and even how attempts to block multiple calls by the use of Caller Line Identification (CLI), can be circumvented if the caller uses 141 to remain anonymous ( Technology, 18 January, p 20 , and Letters, 8 February, p 50 ). …

Bristol The suggestion that antibiotics in animal feeds pose only a small theoretical risk to human health overlooks two key papers ( "Hooked on drugs", 18 January, p 24 ). In 1994, a team led by Janice Bates at the John Radcliffe Hospital Oxford, found vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) in patients who had not …

Sandy Bay, Tasmania Farmers have been giving animals low doses of antibiotics for over 50 years because they promote the efficient use of food, apparently by keeping the animals healthy. In addition, according to your article, a number of low-dose antibiotics improve the ability of human and animal white blood cells to recognise and destroy …

Manitoba, Canada If ever there is going to be a transference with genetic resistance to antibiotics, the place to look is not down on the farm, but in the bedrooms and living rooms of the nation. At the present time, an eight-year-old child can walk into virtually any pet store in North America and purchase …

St Albans, Hertfordshire "Sustainability", "environmental degradation", "ecological hazards" are words which do not appear in the Conservative Party's key policies for British science ( Forum, 25 January, p 47 ). On the other hand, the frequent appearance of words (and their derivatives) such as "industry", "firms", "business", "companies", "enterprise", "defence", "competitiveness", "market economy", "effectiveness" and …

Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire I read with great interest the story about the possibility of DNA finding its way into cells ( This Week, 4 January, p 14 ). I am a retired plant virologist. I used to work at what is now Horticultural Research International at Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, then the National Vegetable Research Station. I carried …

Canberra Will you please explain why the common garden snail, Helix aspersa (now an introduced garden pest in Australia) makes broad intermittent scrape marks with its radula when browsing on the outside cover of New Scientist? The surface pigment is scraped away in patches that are broader than the radula of the snail, but not …

Godalming, Surrey Today is actually 4 February 1997, but my PC is convinced that we're in the year 2000 because I've reset its CMOS system clock to three years in the future and have experienced no problems other than with my pop-up appointments diary. Users should experience few problems with the date from 1 January …

Leeds Of all the problems thrown up by the information technology people, I'm not sure that the omission of the pound sign from the original ASCII set isn't more of a problem than a possible failure to deal with the year 2000—but it will, of course, be solved at a stroke by the introduction of …

Doha, Qatar Further to your search for hell ( Letters, 30 November, p 55 and 25 January, p 51 ), the small town Hell, some miles east of Trondheim, Norway, used to have a railway station with a sign on the wall: "Gods Expedition" ("Cargo delivery" in old-fashioned Norwegian).

Cambridge Hell is other people (Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos).

The article "Seeing with gravity" ( 14 September, 1996 ) contained a number of errors in its discussion of the superconducting gravity gradiometer (SGG) designed by Ho Jung Paik, professor of physics at the University of Maryland. First, Paik developed the SGG in the mid-1970s and not the early 1980s as stated in the article. …