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9 December 2009
From Mikayla Keen
Michael Bond's article discusses the disparity between high IQ scores and the ability to avoid cognitive bias in decision-making: the rationality quotient (RQ) (31 October, p 36) . My research of scientific literacy among tertiary science students revealed similar results. There are two aspects of scientific literacy: content knowledge and process knowledge. They can be …
9 December 2009
From Richard Forrest
As a plesiosaur palaeontologist, I was pleased to see marine reptiles featured in your editorial (31 October, p 5) . But having been closely involved in the announcement to the media of the discovery of the Dorset "Jurassic Coast" pliosaur you refer to, I was slightly miffed to find it described as "not quite as …
9 December 2009
From Anthony Bryant
In her article on short-sightedness (7 November, p 48) , Nora Schultz suggests that a diet high in refined carbohydrates may be implicated in its development, because insulin can stimulate eyeball growth, causing myopia. As excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates is also implicated in the aetiology of dental caries it would be expected that high …
9 December 2009
From Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble
Anil Ananthaswamy's article on supersymmetry discusses in some detail the thoughts of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg concerning possible results from the Large Hadron Collider (14 November, p 36) . The article cites the work of Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs as the source of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, but ignores our …
9 December 2009
From Paul Monaghan
In their article "The truth about the disappearing honeybees" Marcelo Aizen and Lawrence Harder make withering mention of the film Vanishing of the Bees , and go on to assert that there is no pollination crisis (24 October, p 26). Yet no one has so far been able to demonstrate with any confidence what is …
9 December 2009
From William Bains, The Eagle
I was delighted to see that my ground-breaking research into the effects of inebriation on the ability of a group of students to generate random numbers has reached Feedback's desk (14 November) . I urge your readers to check and extend my research in as wide a variety of pubs as they can. But please …
9 December 2009
• It's one mongoose, many mongooses – not mongeese (21 November, p 55) .
Issue no. 2738 published 12 December 2009
