Letters archive

I have just read your editorial, which discusses the current situation in the field of climate change research (28 November, p 5) . In particular you say "that there should be a place in the scientific dialogue for critics to make their views known, for the heretics who are not part of the scientific consensus". …

Michael Bond's article on the relationship between IQ scores and rational decision-making was interesting (31 October, p 36) . When I left university in 1965,I graduated well inside the lower quartile, yet within 10 years of starting work at General Electric I'd accumulated more than 10 patents, then a total of more than 20 over …

Marcus Chown suggests that we might achieve interstellar travel with the use of a fantastic starship consisting of a million-tonne black hole which will be created at the focus of a parabolic mirror, providing a massive thrust due to the reflection of Hawking radiation (28 November, p 34) . The question is: once the ship …

I have suffered since early adulthood from a sleep disorder in which I fight in my sleep, like the person described in your recent article on sleepwalking (28 November, p 12) . Thirty-five years ago I came within an ace of strangling my wife while, I thought, repelling the onslaught of a little yellow duck …

Discussing the destruction of rainforests for financial gain, Eric Worrall rightly points out that rich countries are in no position to lecture poorer ones on conservation (10 October, p 27) . But he fails to consider that there are means by which rainforest areas can be used without wrecking them, such as those noted by …

Feedback mocks the statement made by Noddy Holder of Slade in the lyrics of their song Far Far Away , "I've seen the sunset in the East and in the West", suggesting the band must have travelled to Venus in order to achieve this (Feedback, 28 November) . Seeing "the sunset in the east" is …

Paul Collins's review of Jimena Canales's book A Tenth of a Second states that Canales argues that the effect of human reaction time was highlighted by "astronomers recording the transit of Venus in 1874: precisely timing anything through an eyepiece was bedevilled by human error" (24 October, p 49) . However, Glenn Schneider and I …

The wingsuit adventurers who wish to land without parachutes might benefit from an afternoon's observation of the goings-on in my backyard (14 November, p 41) . When birds come in to land on a tree, they swoop lower than the branch they are aiming for, then glide upwards. This slows them almost to a standstill …

• The Ordnance Survey's 3D maps are more precise then we reported (28 November, p 24) . They are accurate to 4 centimetres in each direction.