Letters archive

I could not agree more with Lawrence Krauss on the dismaying extent of religiosity shown by Republican candidates for US president (28 July, p 21) . Unfortunately, the candidates are a reflection of the electorate. After decades of doing a terrible job in science education we have produced a vast majority of voters who are …

Thank you for your report on chlamydia screening (4 August, p 7) . May I correct a few misunderstandings about our work? The intervention that we evaluated is not being "piloted in England" and we did not invite people to attend clinics for screening. We evaluated proactive chlamydia screening, in which people were sent testing …

Robert Matthews cites the Academy of Medical Sciences' 2006 report Personal Data for Public Good , but muddles two very important issues in reaching his conclusions (4 August, p 18) . The first concerns the important distinction between large, prospective cohort studies, such as Biobank, and research involving the "secondary" use of health information originally …

Incorporating energy efficiency into new buildings is indeed an effective method of cutting carbon emissions. It also uses existing technology and is not excessively expensive (28 July, p 8) . But China is not the only country to have a problem conforming to existing national standards. In the UK, where energy conservation measures have been …

It is a pity that Steve Short of Ecoengineers didn't look a little further north when assuring readers that the drought in Australia is a thing of the past (4 August, p 21) . It may well have broken in the southern half of the continent in recent months, but unfortunately that fizzled out about …

David Shaw claims that there are some concerns with cloning that go beyond the risks we already know about and accept in other forms of reproduction (4 August, p 20) . But his examples are themselves concerns that are already known and accepted in other forms of reproduction. He suggests that if a man and …

You report Antoine Suarez saying that, if Gerard 't Hooft is right and everything is determined, then 't Hooft didn't do his Nobel-prizewinning work, the big bang did (4 August, p 10) . This is a variation on the empty argument that, if there is no "free" will, we should not be locking up criminals …

It is excellent news that parents in the UK will probably be allowed to have sibling saviours to save children with "serious", rather than merely life-threatening diseases (4 August, p 6) . Perhaps legislators should now seize the opportunity not only to permit this far-sighted approach, but also to solve the donor organ crisis. It …

Your article on explaining autism's capriciousness seems to yell out that the condition is sex-linked and on the X chromosome (28 July, p 18) . If men, who inherit only one of their mother's X chromosomes, have a 50 per cent chance of inheriting it, while the odds are much lower for women, who have …

You correctly attributed "boojum" to the great Lewis Carroll (11 August, p 50) . But Carroll's boojum did not "softly and suddenly vanish away"; rather, it mysteriously caused anyone observing it to do so. Researchers studying single-point topological defects should be warned of their mistake before it is too late, or we may all have …

I am horrified and appalled by Gregory Chaitin's review of How Mathematicians Think by William Byers (28 July, p 49) . To say that Euler had "never heard of the notion of mathematical rigour" suggests he had never heard of Euclid. Equally, you cannot say that Ramanujan never comprehended the idea of proof: he had …

In describing evolution's greatest mistakes you omit what for me is its biggest blunder (11 August, p 36) . It relates to the male waterworks. Whoever designed a system that involves a collapsible pipe that passes through an organ that expands with age deserves to be sued for every last penny he has.