Letters archive

Following the article on PM10s (21 September, Inside Science) and Max Wallis's timely warning on fine particles (19 October, p 28) , let me offer some hope based on our own experience. I have recently recorded, in ordinary office environments in London, a horrifying range of between 250,000 and 410,000 particles per cubic foot of …

It seems odd to me that there are not more (apparently) obvious explanations of skin colour than those put forward in your article (12 October, p 34) . For example, has no one considered the radiative properties of skin to explain why people from northerly latitudes are fair-skinned? The main requirement for survival at high …

Adrian Barnett reports an association between varying levels of melanin in skin and the balance between contradictory requirements for protection and synthesis in the skin. These, he notes, vary seasonally in regions away from the equator. He also notes that the number of melanin reservoirs does not vary greatly with skin colour. These observations, taken …

I would like to comment on the controversy surrounding the hazards of gene therapy, highlighted by the case of the French boy who developed leukaemia after being treated with a retrovirus (12 October, p 5) The genetic condition that the boy was being treated for is fatal in every case, while I understand that nowadays …

The letter on "lethal laptops" raises a good but scary point (5 October, p 28) . The writer goes on to ask if there is an alternative to banning electronics on planes. Passengers bring laptops aboard because they want the data and memory, the processing power and the interfaces. They want them on the plane …

Concerning the idea of spending some £335 million reducing emissions of radioactive krypton in order to prevent 80 cancer deaths over 10 years (12 October, p 7), I think we should ask the following question: how much suffering and early death could be prevented if the £335 million were spent on improving health care in …

The report on krypton-85 arising from nuclear fuel reprocessing at Sellafield reminded me of the neat idea developed by Derek Whitmell and co-workers at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in the late 1970s. The krypton storage problem was dealt with by incorporating the gas into copper, layer by layer, using a deposition/sputter …

It seems that Grigori Volovik has found what readers of the Hitchhiker's Guide have known for years – that you can learn about the Universe from small bits of it (12 October, p 28) . It is just that Volovik uses helium rather than fairy cake.

At the moment it may seem like fun to hold your own genome sequence, but have Craig Venter and colleagues considered the task of telling someone that they will develop Parkinson's disease, or end their life in a wheelchair, or simply await the day that their medication may fail and they might be struck down …

• Thanks to the many learned readers who reminded us that "octopi" (5 October, p 10) could not possibly be the correct plural of "octopus" as it is derived from Greek. But we got it right when we referred to octopuses the following week (12 October, p 24) . • In "Sea lion scores top …

The goal of detecting gravitational waves is, as Stephen Battersby writes, truly breathtaking (7 September, p 26). But we strongly reject the suggestion implicit in his article that our project, known as LIGO, offers an inefficient route to this goal. LIGO's task is daunting. It must monitor the separation of mirrors 4 kilometres apart to …