Letters archive

It is unfortunate that Simon Wessely, interviewed in the article "Mind over body?" (14 March, p 26) , attaches a psychosomatic label to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and, by implication, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). This inaccurate label not only creates practical problems for patients, such as inappropriate or harmful treatments and refusal of state benefits, it …

Catherine Brahic's article on geoengineering (28 February, p 8) includes an account by James Fleming of a meeting I attended at NASA's Ames Research Center in California in November 2006. To clarify, at that meeting I advocated working through the Arctic Council to carry out field experiments, not the UN – and as an experiment …

Reading your article on the possibility of observing the contents of Lagrangian points (21 February, p 30) reminded me of work I carried out in the mid-1970s. At that time, I initiated what is now termed the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project. It was the first search to use computer-controlled telescopes, television (and later, …

Unlike Tony Johnson (14 March, p 25), I can't accept that approximate number sense influences our perception that time accelerates as we get older. Rather, it seems to me, it has to do with the flow of information. Have you ever noticed how the first few days of a holiday go really slowly, and then …

Elaine Morgan reminds us that orang-utans are phenotypically more similar to humans than other apes, even though chimpanzees are genetically closest (7 March, p 26) . The explanation for this lies in the resource allocation paradigm of quantitative genetics, and the idea that it is not genes that are naturally selected in each generation, but …

Linda Geddes's sobering report about the reliability of forensic evidence highlights an important scientific issue: the need to establish error rates for any putative source of evidence (28 February, p 6) . Evidential weight depends on more than just the false negative rate – that is, the proportion of cases where the test fails to …

Caroline Williams's article on the worldwide decline in commercial fish stocks (7 March, p 40) made for depressing, if not surprising reading. One aspect she neglected to address, however, was the likelihood that we will over-exploit substitute fish species. Rather than simply switching from one to the next as fisheries crash, we need to find …

Kate Ravilious reports on the Norwegian company Statkraft's proposal to build a football-stadium-sized plant along a Norwegian fjord that would produce, at best, 25 megawatts of electricity by a process based on osmosis (28 February, p 40) . Such a gigantic plant would be expensive, and the scheme requires a large block of land and …

With reference to the article "Fart molecule could be next Viagra" (7 March, p 14) , does hydrogen sulphide only work when you inject it, or could the nightly accumulation of H 2 S from wind trapped under the bedclothes be related to the phenomenon of nocturnal penile tumescence?

• Victoria Todd, whose research we reported in the news story "Oil rigs may be fit for porpoise" (21 March, p 8), is at Ocean Science Consulting, not as we stated. • We mangled the name of the L'Anse aux Meadows settlement when we referred to it in our Histories piece about the Vikings (21 …