Letters archive

In her review of Massimo Pigliucci's book Nonsense on Stilts , Amanda Gefter writes that astrology "lacks a consistent explanatory framework. Constellations aren't real, they are optical illusions resulting from our lack of depth perception when it comes to the night sky, so how can they influence human behaviour?" (22 May, p 48) . Now, …

Your special report on denial (15 May, p 35) failed to recognise its essential role as a psychological defence mechanism. Denial kicks in when there is a major threat to our sense of identity, or when we are confronted with something we cannot cope with knowing. When an alcoholic cannot come to terms with the …

Ernst Fehr is completely right that economic theory should incorporate a bit of realism about human nature (1 May, p 26) . From the beginning economists have assumed that people, individually and en masse, behave rationally. However, rational behaviour in humans is in pretty short supply – even among scientists. And economists seem convinced that …

Craig Venter's successful implantation of a digitally determined genome sequence into a bacterium has been widely reported (29 May, p 6) . Now imagine a future where a successor to Venter is able to digitally reconstruct a set of the best possible sequences of human genomes and incorporate them, in pieces, into bacteria that could …

Jay Pasachoff observes that 5000-year-old glass objects have not sagged visibly (24 April, p 25) . However, he is wrong to conclude that this tells us anything about the fluidity of modern glass. Over the centuries, glass becomes crystalline. This is why antique glass becomes very brittle, and very old glass is often translucent rather …

• Space flight engineer Cody Farnell is at Colorado State University (22 May, p 24) . • We stated that modified bacteria have been used to make a polymer (29 May, p 6) . In fact, the 1,3-propanediol we mention is not itself a polymer, but a chemical building block used in the production of …