Letters archive

Anil Ananthaswamy repeatedly suggests that "the brain" broadcasts information to a global workspace, but makes no attempt to define which area (or areas) of the brain are doing the broadcasting (20 March, p 38) . Something is, he writes, resolving conflicts in the data before broadcasting it. Surely we have here a potential solution to …

Ray Tallis implies that science will never be able to explain consciousness through objective observations and measurements because that is contrary to the subjective nature of the conscious experience (9 January, p 28) . That does not stand up. Conscious experiences can vary a great deal following changes to a person's state of mind elicited …

The idea that vivid motion can be portrayed by bodies in unstable positions rather than by blurring (20 March, p 15) is well known to us comic-book geeks. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in the late 1930s, they included a cape in his costume as a way of suggesting movement. Comic book …

The greenhouse gas methane is getting the attention it deserves (20 February, p 38) . Having worked for over 30 years in the oil industry, I am surprised how little attention is paid to flared and vented "associated gas", which includes methane. This may be as little as 2 per cent of the energy leaving …

Helen Thomson reports on how earthquake engineers can learn from talking to other disciplines (UK edition, 6 March, p 46) . They will find it useful to know which countries may have no quake-proof building regulations, or fail to enforce what they do have. Recent interdisciplinary research into what determines the death toll from major …

Your 6 March cover bears the claim: "Touching the multiverse – first hint that it really exists". But it is almost three years since you reported Anthony Aguirre's work with his graduate student Matthew Johnson: they calculated that we might be able to observe the large-scale signature of other bubble universes in the cosmic microwave …

I was pleased to see a discussion of green clothing (13 March, p 37) . Is it time to revisit fibres such as sisal and jute? The jute plant grows remarkably well on marginal land. But traditional "retting" to free the fibres from the polysaccharide matrix they are bound to is terribly polluting and (for …

I can assure Max Whisson that the Large Hadron Collider will not precipitate a catastrophe (13 March, p 27) . How can I be so sure, when I have had nothing to do with the LHC? My confidence is based upon the fact that every day the Earth is bombarded by cosmic rays, and some …

As someone with a first degree in biochemistry and an MA in theology, I am always fascinated by debates about religion and science. I was dismayed, however, to read that belief in God is equated with belief in "supernatural beings" (6 March, p 3) . In Christian theology God is not seen as an object …

The matter of survival on the Titanic is considerably more complex than you suggested (6 March, p 5) . Some years ago I let undergraduate students on a quantitative methods course loose on data from the survivors list, with the research hypothesis: "Women and Children First?" Beyond doubt, women and children were preferentially treated. Perhaps …

I was interested to read of the 20,000 supporters for an extended prefix system, advocating the prefix "hella" for 10 27 (6 March, p 5) . A set of additional prefixes above "yotta" and below "yocto", including nava (N) for 10 27 and sansa (S) for 10 30 , was proposed as long ago as …

• The Carbon Reduction in Buildings consortium's principal investigator is Kevin Lomas, professor of building simulation at Loughborough University (20 March, p 7) .