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6 May 2009
From Gerry Wolff
It is true that decarbonising the world's economies will require some tough choices, but perhaps not quite as tough as Fred Pearce suggests in his article on the implications of a Severn barrage (18 April, p 32) . A report published by Friends of the Earth Cymru in 2007 quotes evidence that tidal lagoons in …
6 May 2009
From Matthew Godfrey, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Brendan Godley, Center for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Nicholas Mrosovsky, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Jeffrey Seminoff, Marine Turtle Research Program, US National Marine Fisheries Service, Kartik Shanker, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science and Grahame Webb, Wildlife Management International, Sanderson, Northern Territories
In their response to your article on the IUCN Red List, Jeff McNeely and others (4 April, p 20) fail to address specific criticisms of the list that are raised in the special issue of Endangered Species Research that sparked your article. One of these criticisms concerns the threat to the Red List's credibility when …
6 May 2009
From John Mattocks
Fred Pearce's excellent article "Keep the planet's heart pumping" (4 April, p 6) , which described how coastal rainforests could cause rainfall to travel inland, stirred a memory from my youth in eastern England. After the second world war, huge coniferous forests were planted in the Breckland area of Norfolk and Suffolk, replacing what had …
6 May 2009
From Christian Holscher, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster
Your article on déjà vu prompted me to experience an episode of it myself (28 March, p 28) . A few years ago, I worked at the University of Oxford monitoring the neuron response of primates that performed visual memory tasks. We found that many neurons responded most when a new image was shown. However, …
6 May 2009
From Toshi Knell
In his article complaining about media distortion of science, Simon Baron-Cohen says, quite rightly, that "every time the media misreports science, it chips away at the credibility of both enterprises" (28 March, p 26) . But researchers themselves have a part to play in this. To avoid misrepresentation in the media, they must take extreme …
6 May 2009
From Christopher Palmer
Andy Coghlan's article on controlling alcohol consumption using money as a motivation made me wonder if there could be a link between obesity and drinking (28 March, p 22) . Over-dependence upon foods of high glycaemic load contributes to weight gain, and in some individuals seems to lead to a loss of control in limiting …
6 May 2009
From Frances Jacobson
Our tendency not to notice when someone presents us with an item we didn't choose, rather then one we did, is clearly another example of the limits of human conscious awareness (18 April, p 26) . It would be interesting to understand why in 25 per cent of the trials undertaken by Lars Hall and …
6 May 2009
From Michael Chial, University of Wisconsin
Paul Marks discusses the possibility of using otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) as a biometric marker that could be used to identify individuals (11 April, p 16) . This is rather hopeful, as OAEs rely on the outer hair cells in the cochlea being in a healthy condition. OAEs are used to assess the hearing of newborns …
6 May 2009
From Tim Poston, National Institute of Advanced Studies
I was charmed to come across the letter from Fred Ramsey about whether the universe is fundamentally random, which concluded with "I know where my money is" (26 April 2008, p 21) . I wonder if it is still there... or, indeed, anywhere?
Issue no. 2707 published 9 May 2009
