Letters archive

It may be of interest to Feedback's readers to know that bwindi means impenetrable in the Lukiga language (27 May). In 1968 it seemed anomalous to have a forest in Uganda with the English word impenetrable as its name so we asked the local chiefs what the translation was. We adopted the term Bwindi Impenetrable …

It is not only satellite navigation that blanks out the island of Foulness, off the UK's Essex coast (Feedback, 27 May). Searching for it on www.multimap.co.uk points you to a stretch of the Market Weighton Canal in east Yorkshire, and also to an area of the foreshore off Cromer, which is in Norfolk and also …

I can see that a lot of the technology for "redesigning life", or building biological devices, will benefit mankind greatly, but we are afraid of it getting into the wrong hands or getting out of hand (20 May, p 43). What is needed is some sort of "dead man's switch" where the device will only …

Feedback mentions a motorist seeing a sign saying "Beware, underground cables" and not knowing what to do about them (27 May). Such signs are put there, in my native Australia, at least, because if a contractor or anyone else putting in underground services doesn't know about the existence of cables, they are likely to dig …

• The reply to Simon Birnstingl's question about chimp strength wrongly stated that it was written by the editor (3 June, p 22). It was, in fact, a quote from the news website of the journal Nature ( www.nature.com/news ). • In our article on nasty viruses circulating in Europe (6 May, p 6), we …

Why assume the common ancestor of chimps and humans was a knuckle-walker (20 May, p 5)? It's a fair bet it spent a lot of time up trees, but how it moved on the ground is anyone's guess. Knuckle-walking is a specialised mode of locomotion in its own right, not an intermediate stage between quadrupedality …

During the REM sleep state (believed to be linked to dreaming), neurons in our visual cortex fire, as if we really see something. Such activity is thought to generate what we see in dreams, but do we call these neurons dream neurons? No, because the neurons there only provide us with the visual part of …

The second paragraph of the story on gravitational waves begins: "Gravitational waves are set off by extreme events, such as supernova explosions, but they are weak and notoriously difficult to detect" (27 May, p 10). This implies that gravitational waves have actually been detected, albeit with great difficulty. As far as I am aware this …

I read with interest the warnings of a future without bananas due to pandemics of diseases such as black sigatoka fungus (13 May, p 5). In Australia we are in that new world already. Cyclone Larry destroyed all the crops in our main banana-growing regions, and we cannot import bananas due to the diseases mentioned. …

I can see that the rapid disintegration of ice caps and glaciers might cause major, localised geological stresses (27 May, p 32). But I find it hard to believe that the same would be true for moving masses of water due to global warming. Twice every day, the tides cause global rises and falls in …

Several of your articles on how to live to 100 mention that more nuns live to this age than non-nuns (3 June, p 36). This was attributed to clean living and staying active, but another significant difference between this group and others was not addressed. Nuns take a vow of chastity and do not, therefore, …

Exposure to heavy metals is only one possible explanation for the elevated levels of urinary porphyrins found in French children with autism (27 May, p 21). Many other toxic chemicals, such as hexacholorobenzene, drugs such as anabolic steroids, and even chronic exposure to low levels of carbon monoxide (CO) have been found to increase urinary …

Some of the ideas in Marcus Chown's article about "extra" dimensions and warped brane universes sounded awfully familiar (20 May, p 34). It wasn't long ago that physicists were convinced that light travelled in "ether". Now they are convinced that gravity travels in the "bulk". Bulk or ether, what's the difference? It seems to me …

You say it that it is not uncommon for people in Zimbabwe to eat soil as an instinctive way of redressing dietary deficiencies in trace minerals, and that the soil also contains a treatment for diarrhoea (27 May, p 54). Given that soil bacteria from South Africa have been found to contain an antibiotic effective …

Your article on our report Status of Tropical Forest Management 2005 says, "20 years of international pledges and environmental campaigning have barely improved the state of the world's tropical forests". But the article fails to recognise that it is partly because of the low level of financial assistance provided by the international community that progress …