Letters archive

Temuka, New Zealand I am writing in response to Les Ward's comments about the trialling of Woolover lamb covers ( Letters, 9 August, p 50 ). The trial mentioned in the article did not deliberately set out to expose newborn lambs to uncharacteristic and unnecessarily harsh weather conditions, but highlighted the weather conditions that can …

Windermere, Cumbria As George Turner says in his interesting article, the cichlid fishes of the Great Lakes of Africa have indeed undergone rapid speciation, but that the entire flock of 500 or more species found in Lake Victoria evolved within the last 12 500 years is less well established than is suggested ( "Small fry …

Teddington, Middlesex May I suggest a couple of technical difficulties with the proposal to store nuclear waste in exhausted oilfields ( Letters, 16 August, p 47 ). Past performance being no guarantee of future results, we would need some way of calculating the impact of erosion until the waste decayed to inert levels. Just because …

Ottawa, Canada Previous comments on presenting foreign language films to English speaking (hearing?) audiences favour subtitles over dubbing ( Letters, 23 August, p 48 ). The reasons are logical, but there is still a sound reason for dubbing. My wife has cataracts. While surgery may yet repair her eyes, she is unable to read text …

richardm@atrium1.advance. com.au I enjoyed your comments about Switzer's e-mail list (Feedback, 19 July and 9 August ). It appears these lists are compiled by "spambots" who scan Web pages and Usenet newsgroups for addresses. One would hope that these unqualified addresses would be recognised as useless by other marketers, but it appears not. The initial …

nc566@gre.ac.uk I have theoretically managed to break the speed of light, c, without gaining any noticeable mass. It's quite simple. If you scale down the whole Universe to the size of my bedroom, you can run from one wall to another (effectively billions and billions of light years) in the space of 3.142 seconds. Scaling …

douglas.graham@mcmail.com Your article about Q-balls reveals that physicists at CERN in Geneva wish to use large (1 gram) particles to induce proton decay and release large amounts of energy ( This Week, 30 August, p 18 ). This does then seem to be a real supply of "limitless" energy. However, as all of the particles …

rochonda@em.agr.ca Your article states that transgenic plants expressing viral genes can serve as sources of genetic information for the formation of new viruses in plants. As the scientist quoted in parts of this article, I would note, as I did at the meeting, that the recombination experiments described were not conducted using transgenic plants. Nor, …

Baulkham Hill, New South Wales You are right to be concerned that the standard way of cooking lobsters is to boil them alive ( Feedback, 16 August, p 84 ). Contrary to your advice from the director of the Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant Lobster Institute, lobsters almost certainly feel pain as do all sentient creatures. …

Basel, Switzerland A recent article picks on the holes of a potentially life-saving health intervention: insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) in Africa ( This Week, 16 August, p16 ). Much space was devoted to the work of a group, led by Bob Snow, which is working in Kenya. Despite the fact that Snow and his colleagues claim …

by e-mail Can I remind Barry Fox that Microsoft's plans to port Internet Explorer to the Mac does not make it a world standard ( Forum, 30 August, p 46 ). There are many people who look at Web pages using Unix or other mainframe systems for which Microsoft solutions are unavailable. Leaving aside the …

Ames, Iowa Kurt Kleiner's article could generate hysterical fear of transgenic potatoes that are immune to potato leaf roll virus because their DNA has been altered to include the virus's replicase genes ( This Week, 16 August, p 4 ). He fails to mention that these potatoes should greatly reduce the occurrence of this damaging …

London In Robert Pool's report on new drugs for combating the epidemic of obesity in the Western world ( "Things can only get thinner", 23 August, p 22 ) there is a box entitled "Can you be too skinny?" Here it states that for body mass indexes (BMIs) up to 27 or 28, weight is …

Epping, Essex I read "What really killed the dinosaurs?" ( 16 August, p 22 ) with great interest, particularly Allen and Yabushita's proposition of an encounter with a giant molecular cloud (GMC). I came to a similar conclusion in a paper entitled "On the origin of change", submitted 17 years ago to the Journal of …