Letters archive

Your recent editorial on the rights and wrongs of animal testing (27 January, p 3) was highly relevant, for both sides of the Atlantic. Public awareness of official inaction is increasing in the US. The Environmental Protection Agency continues to condemn hundreds of thousands of animals to painful death by promoting massive animal-testing programmes that …

Feedback reports light-heartedly that people may soon live for 130 or even 150 years (27 January) . Have the scientists who are engaged on anti-ageing research given any thought to the social, economic and environmental consequences if their work is successful? I find it far more frightening than genetically modified food or even cloning.

Nick Deane (27 January, p 51) is very negative about space colonisation, and believes it will only be done to benefit us here on Earth. Yes, emigration to other planets or into space cannot possibly solve the burgeoning problem of overpopulation and it would take colossal numbers of space launches just to keep up. But …

Although our technology won't permit large-scale migration into space for quite some time, this is not an argument against exploration. We have never turned aside from challenges and adventures—it would be a sorrier world if we did. To those who say we should not expand into space before resolving all the problems on Earth, I …

I congratulate Nick Deane on his excellent letter. Space colonisation is, indeed for now, a triumph of hope over reality. Many of us have seen how glossy space movies make the whole thing look easy, rather than unbelievably difficult. Only if science can save our little planet will we be able to boldly go any …

Patrick Bateson was correct to highlight the dangers of scientists being influenced by the self interests of funding bodies (6 January, p 38) , especially when this concerns public debate or even government policy. While such dangers cannot be ignored, we can only hope our system of peer review will prevent such a study being …

While looking through some obscure websites the other day, I came upon one concerned with the functions of angels in religious traditions. Two quotations leapt out at me: "Angels are what are called the laws of nature" (John Henry Newman); "Whatever is happening in the physical system does not take place without the mediation of …

C. Wells (20 January, p 50) suggests that MPs were not aware that blood stem cells are available from placentas and umbilical cords after birth when they voted to allow the use of embryonic stem cells for research. I would like to reassure your readers that this was not the case. Indeed, some of us …

Regarding your news article "Cod's last gasp" (27 January, p 16) , while the demise of North Sea cod is a major worry, I must quibble with your south of England bias. I was brought up in Yorkshire, the home of "fish and chips", and if you go into a chip shop there and just …

The patent for remote-control robotic sex (20 January, p 7) will come as no surprise for readers of Stanislaw Lem's novel, Peace On Earth. Lem, who predicted nanotechnology and virtual reality as early as 1963, also anticipated another application for full-sized remote control mannequins—as a proxy for criminals committing robbery. When the police backtracked the …

Ben Sewell in his search for 1-sided paper in a stationery shop (Feedback, 6 January) didn't even need to turn his paper into a Möbius strip as Lee Angus suggests (27 January, p 53) . Since a piece of paper is made of atoms it also has depth and is in fact a cuboid, which …

Richard Turtle asks for suggestions as to how he might while away a long space flight running his model railway (27 January, p 52) . Surely he has not overlooked the possibilities of magnetism or centrifugal force, though I imagine spinning the spacecraft just to keep him happy might be considered a bit over the …