Letters archive

Centre d'Excellence en Troubles Envahissants du Développement, University of Montreal I appreciate the premise underlying David Wolman's welcome feature about the advantages of autism (1 May, p 32) . However, the careful, accurate reporting that this subject deserves is sometimes lacking. For example, our 2007 study using the Raven's Progressive Matrices neither cited from published …

Thank you for the report by Peter Aldhous, Jim Giles and Brad Stenger on Pfizer's payments to censured doctors (1 May, p 8) . It provided yet more evidence of the complex and controversial relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors come into contact with drug manufacturers on a daily basis. After all, we …

Stephen Ornes reports on Rick Mabry's research into the difficulties of certain pool shots and his finding that the hardest shot is when the distance between the cue ball and object ball is 1.618 times that between the object ball and the pocket (8 May, p 34) . In my experience, the major source of …

Your editorial conclusion that "we need to go beyond bizarre installations and amusing gizmos" (8 May, p 3) is totally justified by what appears in the accompanying "Art and science" special ( p 43 ). That, however, is because Martin Kemp and Jonathan Keats seem unaware of the much broader art-science interactions taking place outside …

The dire warnings found on some relaxing aromatic candles, which excited Feedback's derision (8 May) , are far from unusual. I spent last weekend in a holiday home equipped with a wood-burning stove that was able to consume 2 cubic feet of logs in an hour – yet the building handbook imposes a blanket ban …

Henry Nicholls states in his article on taming animals that the zebra is a "stubborn beast, one that has thwarted all efforts to domesticate it" (3 October 2009, p 40) . However, Walter Rothschild had a team of tame zebras at his Tring Park estate in Hertfordshire, UK, and was often seen driving a zebra-drawn …

My eyebrows shot up on reading correspondence from Jack Wretch on the subject of Morning Chicness bags for expectant mothers (Feedback, 1 May) . Are we in a new phase of nominative determinism?

• We ascribed "superlative hardness" to gold and silver in our article on precious materials in electronics when in fact we meant diamonds (24 April, p 28) . • Japan's AKATKUSI Venus Orbiter is not the country's first interplanetary spacecraft (15 May, p 10) . It would be the first to successfully reach another planet, …