Letters archive

David Robson's article discussing the mud-slinging aimed at those who do not accept the anti-smoking lobby's views on passive smoking (4 April, p 34) should remind us that policy debates involving the tobacco industry have always been contentious. The key issue is always to get the science right. This will be helped by the rigorous …

Avis Pearson criticises New Scientist for asking the next head of ATLAS what she thinks about becoming the first woman to head a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and asks "what has her sex got to do with anything?" (28 March, p 24) . The answer must surely be "quite …

The consequences of an "Arctic meltdown" reach further than carbon release (28 March, p 32) . Much of the land surrounding the Arctic Ocean resists erosion only because it is frozen. Once the thawed wetland edges are exposed to storm waves and currents, they will rapidly be eroded, increasing the amount of sediment entering the …

Although the atheist majority in science will no doubt agree with Amanda Gefter (21 March, p 23) , I would suggest that she is wrong about what science is and how it works. There is no reason why scientific explanations should be limited to exclusively material causes; science is about methodological realism. Hypotheses must necessarily …

Emma Young's article on the link between sleep and mental illness (21 February, p 34) prompted me to write of my experiences as a doctor in an addictions facility. H. F. Molloy reported in 1993 that overheating the body during sleep can result not only in severe skin disease but also in disturbed sleep ( …

Andy Coghlan's report on whether praying to God causes the same brain activity as talking to friends (11 April, p 9) made me wonder which areas become active when a person claims God is communicating with them. Would there be activity in the usual auditory areas? And are the communications connected to creative or other …

Further to Helen Thomson's article on the effects of smoking an electronic cigarette (14 February, p 33) , it must be emphasised that the World Health Organization is not certain that research funded by manufacturers of these products is independent or legitimate. This is particularly true in the absence of sufficient information to evaluate the …

In his letter, Tom Verberne quotes Ilkka Henrik Mäkinen on suicidology: "Neither the individual-level causes nor the general-level correlates of suicide have been clarified to a satisfactory extent" (11 April, p 23) . There is actually a lot of information available on the subject, accessibly brought together in The Neurobiology of Suicide: From the bench …

Feedback commented on the incongruous warning aimed at pregnant or lactating women on a men's multivitamin supplement (4 April) . The explanation is simple: the tablets contain vitamin A. By UK law, all supplements containing vitamin A must carry a warning to women who are either pregnant or breastfeeding. This is because vitamin A in …

• The arxiv URL in our article on internet surveillance should have been www.arxiv.org/abs/0903.3218 (4 April, p 17) . • The figure of 3400 road fatalities per month in the US is for overall road accident deaths, not just pedestrian deaths (18 April, p 18) .