Letters archive

Ian Stewart's article on the mathematics of voting seems to take pleasure in the fact that no voting system is perfect, while failing to acknowledge that the relative merits of voting systems should be investigated and qualitatively assessed (1 May, p 28) . To my mind, the voting system here in Australia has several advantages, …

It is a major oversight that your article on biodiversity mentions micro-organisms only fleetingly (24 April, p 32) . Furthermore, you report that "our best estimates so far give the number of species between 1.4 and 1.9 million". These numbers ignore David Hawksworth's widely accepted estimate of 1.5 million species of fungi , with the …

In her article on how much a human can lift, Jessica Marshall begins by mentioning Andy Bolton's record for the heaviest dead lift (17 April, p 34) . Bolton holds this record in power lifting, but the heaviest dead lift record belongs to Benedikt Magnússon of Iceland, who lifted 498.9 kilograms using straps. Marshall also …

I found the explanation for Minnesotan frog deformities put forward in Jessica Griggs's article somewhat implausible (13 March, p 48) . Griggs correctly states that there are perfectly natural reasons why some of the frogs may have had limb irregularities, and suggests parasites and dragonfly larvae as causes for the extra and missing legs respectively. …

Sam Little recounts how donkey carcasses used to be planted beneath asparagus fields to improve yields (1 May, p 25) . It was traditional when constructing a vinery in Victorian times to bury a large animal, even a carthorse if available, in the bed where the vines were to be planted. In later times when …

Nic Fleming envisages a future of self-driving cars that communicate with each other about road conditions (3 April, p 34) . If this vision becomes reality, each car will in effect form part of a self-optimising system. Unfortunately, when such systems contain no slack, they can fail spectacularly if a single component goes wrong; traffic …

• Jeffrey Macklis, whose studies of brain-cell generation we mentioned (3 April, p 29) , is at Harvard University, not MIT. Contrary to what we stated, many groups apart from his own have found so-called "progenitor" cells, possibly left over from brain development, in parts of the brain in which new neurons are not normally …