Letters archive

The basis of Feedback's confusion about the percentage of pork in Pepperami (108 per cent) is probably the use of the word "ingredients" (29 May). This is not an analysis, it is the start of a recipe: to make 100 kilograms of Pepperami, take 108 kilograms of pork… Presumably Pepperami, like salami, chorizo and other …

The UK Food Labelling Regulations 1996 require that most pre-packed foods have a quantitative ingredient declaration for major ingredients. These are normally expressed as a percentage and must be expressed in terms of the ingredients at the "mixing bowl" stage. If water is lost during processing (due to drying in the case of salami) then …

The answer to the percentage problem is given on the admirably clear label of a Hungarian salami made by Pick, of Szeged in Hungary: "Ingedients: Pork (min. 161 per cent), Fat, Salt, Spices, Preservative E260. Made with 161 grams of raw pork meat per 100 grams of salami. Moisture is lost during curing and maturation."

• In The Last Word (15 May), the amount of food an 83-kilogram human should eat each day in order to match that consumed by a hummingbird was given as 125 kilograms. This figure was correct. However, the wording of the text suggests the person should eat three times as much food (249 kilograms) as …

Thank you for publishing the article questioning big bang theory. The standard "concordance" model is so entrenched that many editors would have refused to publish such a paper that dared to question the cosmological paradigm, even though its criticisms are well founded. The trick is to have a credible alternative against which the paradigm may …

The match between theory and experiment in the buckyball diffraction experiment is pretty poor (15 May, p 30). According to the original paper in Nature (vol 427, p 711), the curve describing Anton Zeilinger's quantum decoherence theory passes under many of the data points. Scientifically one needs to assess whether the measurements distinguish his decoherence …

David Bellamy correctly points out one positive result of global warming ( 22 May, p 30 ). The extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause increased plant production and, through their roots, plants will bury "lots more organic humus in the soil" thus improving the soil. So far, so good – there is published …

Perry Bebbinton suggests that if you save money through reduced fuel costs, "pretty much everything I can think of will have used energy in its manufacture, distribution, or…use" (29 May, p 30). It is that "thing" which betrays the false assumption. Things take energy to produce; services do not. You could spend the money on …

We were interested to read Ian Simmons's letter suggesting that someone establish a "Journal of Negative Results" (15 May, p 29). Bruce Charlton made this same suggestion in the pages of New Scientist as far back as 1987 (29 October 1987, p 72). There are now at least three journals dedicated to the promotion of …

Eric Lerner comments that virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies (22 May, p 20). I would interested to know if the Hubble Space Telescope and the COBE and WMAP microwave background probes would have been designed differently if the prevailing cosmological paradigm was not the hot big …