Letters archive

Congratulations to Rachel Nowak and New Scientist for the accurate and refreshingly balanced account of environmental alarmism on the Great Barrier Reef (4 January, p 8) . The article makes the important point that the allegations regarding damage to the reef are mostly made in unpublished or unrefereed reports, or in media statements and declarations …

The letter from Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and others (1 February, p 24) ignores the main points outlined in Rachel Nowak's article. These are as follows. • The general public has been deceived into believing that the great barrier reef is in very poor shape. • This deception has been a result of a combination of overzealous …

Your article on the imminent demise of the edible banana (18 January, p 27) has many parallels with the late-18th-century Phylloxera aphid plague that devastated the vineyards of France and elsewhere. Just like the vine-destroying aphids, the fungal diseases that scourge bananas today attack the roots. In desperation, viniculturists grafted millions of French vine tops …

Your editorial and accompanying articles on dark matter puzzle over an apparent paradox in astrophysics ( 25 January, p 3 , p 28 and p 34 ). If galaxies spin as rapidly as they appear to, if they contain only the matter we can see, and if gravity behaves the way it's supposed to, then …

We were pleased to see that you have drawn attention to the interesting work of Stewart Wuest, which shows that seeds take up a large proportion of soil water as vapour rather than liquid (18 January, p 19) . It seems that the accepted wisdom that seeds need good contact with the soil for fast …

I couldn't help noticing a that the patents described in the 18 January patents column (p 18) were all about disposable versions of familiar objects. I was wondering whether any environmental organisations have tried patenting disposable versions of such objects with the aim of preventing them being produced?

Feedback reports on the King of Sweden rebuffing Nobel prizewinner Richard Robert's offer of a handshake (11 January) . In spite of the current practice of shaking hands every time you meet someone, traditionally gentlemen need shake hands only once, when being introduced for the first time, to show that they do not have a …

I was very interested by the seven criteria offered as indicators of addiction in your article on fast food (1 February, p 28) . Replace the word "substance" with "television" and almost any one of us will match the required three out of seven criteria. You could even consider obesity as the harm done by …

Reader Ken Green states he's confused by his hot chocolate and wonders what exactly he's drinking (Feedback, 25 January) . Well, the majority of hot chocolate is indeed sugar. It's not unduly sweet because it is offset by the bitter taste of cocoa. You can make hot chocolate by mixing 3 parts icing sugar with …

• Our article on whether or not to censor research that could be exploited by bioterrorists (18 January, p 10) includes a quote attributed to Claire Fraser, president of The Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland. The quote, taken from a Nature Genetics commentary she co-authored with Malcolm Dando of the University of Bradford in …

There are about 200 published scientific papers detailing GM safety investigations using animal feeding, compositional tests and toxicology of introduced traits. A bibliography by the International Life Sciences Institute is at www.ilsi.org/publications/pubslist.cfm ? pubentityid=60&publicationid=348. None of these give any credence to the BMA or Zambian leadership's position.

In your article on the link between starving Zambians rejecting genetically-modified food aid and a 1999 British Medical Association report, the BMA's Vivienne Nathanson "denies the association has said that GM crops are harmful" (1 February, p 4) . However, according to an article published in The Lancet (vol 353, p 1769), "BMA head of …