Letters archive

Kurt Kleiner's report on ancient forests misses the point that palynology – the study of pollen and spores – is not a precise science (12 March, p 11). Fraser Mitchell's paper is a case in point. The percentages of tree pollen in dated deposits provide very rough measurements and it is inconceivable that these can …

Ensuring that "black box" voice recorders have battery back-ups seems sensible (5 March, p 4). However in an era when the smallest of companies routinely backs up its files to a remote location, storing data at the point of production, never mind 8 kilometres up in the air, seems a little outdated. At any one …

I very much enjoyed your review of the current developments in tactile communication devices (26 February, p 28). Considering how much of our brains are devoted to touch it's surprising how long it has taken tactility to enter telecommunications. When I patented the first system for tactile telephone communications back in 1973 I imagined it …

Your item about self-lighting cigarettes stirred memories buried in a haze of ancient smoke (19 March, p 25). The Israelis may be about to patent the idea, but the British beat them to it – by about 40 years. Self-igniting ciggies were sold, albeit briefly, in tobacconists' shops in the UK in the 1960s, along …

• In our feature about organic transistors (19 March, p 38) our wording incorrectly implied that Bertram Batlogg had recently moved from Bell Labs to the Technical University of Zurich. He actually moved in 2000. We should also emphasise that he and all other co-authors of Hendrik Schön's work were cleared of any scientific misconduct.

The researchers into bullying at the University of Minnesota asked schoolchildren to say how aggressive their classmates were and also which members of the opposite sex they would ask to a party. They concluded that "boys have high status with their male peers if they are bullies, and girls like them". They may have asked …

Neil Fisher (5 March, p 32) suggests that most of the global warming projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are flawed because, he thinks, there must be negative feedbacks which will counter global warming (5 March, p 32). He believes that, without such negative feedbacks, the climate would not have been stable over …

Contrary to Alan Stephenson's assertion (19 March, p 29) Richard Stallman did not give an example of how a so-called "software patent" impedes development (5 February, p 28). Stallman made that claim, but gave no example of any development that has actually been impeded. He also omitted to point out that, as can readily be …

In Paul Davies's article on the emergence of life, the positions of the reductionists – who claim life can be predicted from the laws of atomic physics – and of those who support "strong emergence" – who believe additional laws emerge at various levels of complexity – were I thought very well described, and I …

Referring to the matter of wind power for ships, I tried this out in a 29-foot (9 metre) yacht some years ago. It was clear to me that the major advantage would be that the line of traction could be made to pass much closer to the line of resistance through the keel. In principle …

It is very interesting that the wealth of the majority of people fits a curve that describes the energies of atoms in a gas (12 March, p 6), but there is no mystery here. The underlying reason for this skew was explained in 1879 by the economist Henry George, who showed it was caused by …

You draw attention to the need for better ventilation on passenger planes during outbreaks of diseases such as SARS (19 March, p 15). When smoking was permitted on aircraft, cabin air was circulated and replaced to a far greater extent than at present. Banning smoking on aircraft in effect greatly reduced the air quality, as …

Philip Fearnside believes emissions from reservoirs should be included in calculations of a country's carbon budget. But the claim that hydropower projects are net producers of greenhouse gases is not correct (26 February, p 8). Carbon released from reservoirs is part of the "contemporary" carbon cycle, as it was recently drawn from the atmosphere by …

I think the mention of homeopathy in your article about things that don't make sense ( 19 March, p 30 ) is incomplete without some mention the BBC TV Horizon programme on this topic, the transcript of which is at www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathytrans.shtml The Belfast results you report were tested with a double blind procedure and came …

I found David Nagel's statement comparing our understanding of cold fusion to that of superconductivity before it was explained by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer to be misleading (19 March, p 30). Prior to their theory the phenomenon of superconductivity was an experimentally proven result that could be reproduced in many different materials. …

The scenario you describe in the experiments on altruism, that individuals have frequent "one-shot" interactions with strangers, who they never interact with again, is very unlike the real world (12 March, p 33). The fact that you have met someone once means that you have something in common, and thus may meet them again. In …