Letters archive

Fred Pearce's lucid description of thermal solar electricity generation in the Sahara desert (24 October, p 38) mentions three potential drawbacks of the Desertec plan: its location in unfriendly and politically unstable countries, the lack of cooling water where the solar radiation is most intense, and the considerable distance to European consumers. Would it not …

Douglas Fox's article explores the idea that we experience time through discrete snapshots of reality, and offers an explanation of why we recall time as having apparently slowed down during stressful events (24 October, p 32) . I have long thought that the idea of a snapshot nature of memory also comes into play during …

In your interview with Richard Leakey, you report that he steps aside from the debate on whether Homo floresiensis – the "hobbit" – represents a distinct species. Instead, he states that their status is not very important to the story of human evolution (17 October, p 32) . In fact, it is fairly well accepted …

Your report on Judy Mikovits's study linking a retrovirus, XMRV, to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) (17 October, p 6) , along with the longer online article (newscientist.com/article/dn17947) , has elicited cautious optimism in people with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). ME has long been written off as malingering or of psychiatric origin, so there are hopes that …

I read with interest Irving Kirsch's article describing how the antipsychotic drugs given to people with Alzheimer's disease can shorten their lives (17 October, p 26) . The article suggested that this might be a bad thing. My father died of Alzheimer's disease, and it took nearly 10 years. He progressed from an old-fashioned gentleman, …

I was rather surprised that, when discussing ITER (10 October, p 40) , no mention was made of ZETA, the Zero Energy Toroidal Assembly that was built at the UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. I remember working at British Thomson-Houston in Rugby on component parts for this experimental fusion reactor in 1957. At …

• We understated the strength of gravity on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan (7 November, p 44) . It is in fact one-seventh that on Earth