Letters archive

What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that "Darwin was wrong" ( 24 January )? First, it's false, and second, it's inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about evolution. Nothing in the article showed …

Richard Hammond discusses keeping children interested in science (3 January, p 14) . The media have a vital role to play here. Their obsession with doctors and hospitals means that the scientists behind medical breakthroughs do not receive sufficient credit. Witness the recent media frenzy over the birth of the first baby in the UK …

A. C. Grayling suggests that "an international consortium of universities should set up panels to audit the worth of websites" (17 January, p 44) . Considering the volume of information online and its exponential growth, any such undertaking would be outdated before it could report. We should not worry about the transcription errors that Grayling …

I can confirm, from personal experience, that post-traumatic stress can be moderately alleviated by Tetris (17 January, p 12) . Having had two nervous breakdowns in the last five years, I needed (and still need) to find some way of suppressing my thoughts, memories and flashbacks of trauma. Not being a drinker and being too …

Your piece on babies' sense of rhythm (31 January, p 15) made me wonder why rhythm is so attractive. Could it be connected to a fear of uncertainty? When immersed in rhythmic music, the beat tantalises us with the illusion of near-certainty of what – in terms of sound – is about to happen in …

The New Zealand coal industry recently announced that it will cut production by 20 per cent due to a 30 per cent decrease in overseas steel manufacture. Is this part of a world trend? It will be interesting to see this year's figures for the levels measured at the carbon dioxide sampling centre at Mauna …

The problem accounting for the anomalous motions of interplanetary probes under gravity could be resolved if there were more than one gravity (20 September 2008, p 38) . Until not very long ago, matter was considered as more or less one stuff, forming different elements. Now we know better. Baryons (protons and neutrons) can be …

Dan Jones writes that people often find scientific research ethically objectionable due to fear of the unknown or the "yuk response" (10 January, p 29) . I had a yuk response of my own. I couldn't believe he made no mention of a very recent, morally repugnant invention: the cyborg animal. These are animals whose …

Frans de Waal asks "Why do humans blush?", and states that we are the only primate to do so (31 January, p 41) . How does he know? Would blushing be visible in hairy primates or, for that matter, in dark-skinned humans? Maybe research has answered these questions. If so, it would be interesting to …

Pedro Ferreira, reviewing Graham Farmelo's biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man , says "he comes across as a truly unpleasant man. I am surprised that people put up with him" (10 January, p 43) . To me, Dirac came across as hilarious. His "When I say 'Yes', it does not mean that I agree; …

• The correct DOI for the paper by Caroline Ummenhofer and colleagues on El Niño ( 7 February, p 16) is 10.1029/2008GL036801

What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that "Darwin was wrong" (24 January) ? First, it's false, and second, it's inflammatory. The subtitle, "cutting down the tree of life", made matters worse. The cover story is about recent discoveries of horizontal gene transfer, chimeras, and endosymbiosis: but since Darwin …

It was with some déjà vu that I read A. C. Grayling's proposal to establish a clerical elite to pronounce a canon of websites deemed acceptable for use in schools and other public institutions (17 January, p 44) . Here are three names from the past: Nupedia, Google Answers, and Best of the Web. Their …

Sorry, Robert Scopes, but Copernicus is also the wrong heretic (24 January, p 29) . History usually gives Galileo the credit for explaining why the sun rises every morning – hence Steve Jones's choice, (20/27 December 2008, p 71) . I would give it to Johannes Kepler. Copernicus won't wash because, briefly, his theory was …

Mark Buchanan's article pointing to the implications of the minuscule possibility of the Large Hadron Collider producing a black hole is no doubt right to consider the difficulty of understanding the mathematical probability in realistic terms (24 January, p 32) . But he barely considers the significance of the consequences. If it does result in …

Most people who resist things like genetically-modified organisms are not doing it because they think scientists should not play God (10 January, p 29) . They resist because they perceive a danger to themselves, to other organisms and the environment. I live in a country whose rivers are degraded and whose land is increasingly salinated …

I read with interest the letter from Douglas Kell regarding the Meyer-Overton hypothesis and the mode of action of anaesthetics (7 February, p 18) . While the work of Paul Dobson and others is ground-breaking and certainly goes a long way to providing explanation of the long-held mysteries of anaesthetic action, it cannot be the …