Letters archive

In his article on taming wild animals, Henry Nicholls presents geneticist Dmitry Belyaev's intriguing proposition that when our ancient ancestors approached a herd of animals, they identified the less skittish ones and took them home to breed (3 October, p 40) . Although the article presents the trait being selected for as tameness rather than …

Your article on engineering pain-free farm animals (5 September, p 8) and the accompanying editorial "Pain-free but not guilt-free" (5 September, p 5) , would have benefited from the input of people with experience in rearing domestic livestock. Livestock producers already expend a lot of thought and investment endeavouring to keep livestock comfortable and pain-free, …

W. Brian Arthur and Robert Cailliau both made the argument on your pages that technology progresses through evolutionary mechanisms ( 22 August, p 26 and 19 September, p 27 , respectively). However, it is part of the received wisdom in the field of reliability engineering that no new design is wholly revolutionary or wholly evolutionary. …

Nicola Jones reports her experience of hypnosis, during which unsuccessful attempts to make her experience paralysis and blindness are carried out (10 October, p 37) . What she fails to mention is that similar attempts to replicate pathological behaviour with hypnosis date back 70 years at least, most notably to the work of psychiatrist Milton …

To get maximum efficiency on a hot day, (12 September, p 26) Stephen Hodges tell us that he uses a sprinkler to cool the solar cells that he has on the roof of his Jamaican home. There are other forms of cooling that work just as well. For example, over 24 hours a "living roof" …

Since reading about the decimation of bat populations around wind farms (12 May 2007, p 4) , I've wanted to contribute the results of some deviant research I conducted as a boy in the UK. My brother and I used to throw sticks at the bats fluttering outside our bedroom window, for obvious reasons. The …

• In our article "Don't provoke the planet" (26 September, p 8) we stated: "A CCS facility at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, may have triggered a magnitude 4 earthquake in 2008." This was incorrect: the earthquake was of magnitude 3.1 and was some 55 kilometres away from the Sleipner field. There …