Letters archive

Your article on C. P. Snow's legacy prompted me to wonder why his thesis that there are "two cultures" is considered to be false (2 May, p 26) . His worries about the compartmentalisation of thought and knowledge, otherwise known as subject specialisation, still seem valid to me. Snow's concern was about the failure of …

Catherine Brahic's online article, "Humanity's carbon budget set at one trillion tonnes" (staging.newscientistbeta.com/article/dn17051) implies a frightening statistic. If we are to collectively emit no more than 250 billion tonnes of carbon in order to reduce the probability of a 2 °C warming to 25 per cent, then for today's population we each have only 36 …

The underwater photographs taken by Nico Michiels, revealing that the eyes of some deep-sea fish glow red, will strike an eerie chord with many optical engineers (4 April, p 38) . The red fluorescence around gobies' eyes reminded me of a similar arrangement used in CGI filming. A ring of monochromatic LEDs surrounds the camera …

The front cover of your 9 May issue flaunts the headline: "The mysterious monopole – predicted by theory, hunted for decades, found at last". Exciting news, I thought, until I reached the cover story inside and found a very different description: "They are not exactly the monopoles of physics lore, but they could provide us …

Reading Fred Pearce's article on the Severn barrage, it strikes me that there are viable alternatives (18 April, p 32) . Imagine a steel tank 150 metres long by 100 metres wide, open at the bottom, and anchored to the seabed at a depth where its top is above water at high tide and its …

David Robson's article on the zeal of the anti-smoking lobby was rather more cautious than it could have been (4 April, p 34) . I have spent years looking for published evidence that environmental tobacco smoke is dangerous to health, but have failed to find any. We see plenty of papers on the presence of …

Erich Plaut's comments, reported in Feedback, about the absurdity of comparing the taste of wine to that of stone (9 May) show that he was never a student of geology in the 1970s. My father told me it was common practice to taste rocks to help identify them. I'm not sure his stones were crushed, …

It is ironic that in the week the Enigma puzzle featured a pentagon with each apex joined to a central point, Chrysler filed for bankruptcy (2 May, p 24) . The Chrysler symbol is just such a pentagon. Not nominative determinism: perhaps predictive semiology?

• It must be the rising sea levels that did it: what else could have shifted southern Bangladesh a couple of thousand kilometres west of where it belongs on our map of the world's low-lying areas (9 May, p 37) ?