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30 June 2010
The editor writes: • Alex Bellos reported a probability conundrum posed by Gary Foshee at the recent Gathering for Gardner event: "I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?" (29 May, p 44) . We have been deluged with contributions about it, with …
30 June 2010
From Kathy Archibald, Safer Medicines Campaign
Simon Festing says that reducing publication bias in animal research would ensure a sound basis to move from animal studies into clinical trials (5 June, p 22) . This would be true if the results of animal studies translate directly to humans. They do not, which is a far more important problem than publication bias. …
30 June 2010
From Dave Kimber
Having found that autistic children are confused by shadows as part of drawn objects, Umberto Castiello concludes that they are distracted by shadows, and suggests that classrooms should therefore be well-lit, according to your report (22 May, p 16) . It seems to me that what his experiment detected was distractions within a task, not …
30 June 2010
From Ed Rybicki, Molecular and Cell Biology Department, University of Cape Town
I was a little nettled when I read the original article on biodiversity (24 April, p 32) , because there was no mention at all of the greatest part of the biodiversity on this planet: viruses. There are more viruses on Earth than any other kind of organism, and virus genomes provide the greatest source …
30 June 2010
From Dan Bleicher
As an engineer and scientist, I was dismayed to read the article in which Bob Ward suggests that the scientific community ought to use public-relations techniques to rectify society's view of science (29 May, p 26) . If a few scientists use unscientific methods to advance their views then we should denounce them, not protect …
30 June 2010
From Peter Russell
The free iPhone /iPad application Skeptical Science contains a comprehensive set of counter-arguments to climate-deniers, one of the groups mentioned in your special on denial ( 15 May, p 35 ). The app gives detailed rebuttals to more than 100 different arguments a denier may use – very useful in the pub when you don't …
30 June 2010
• Paul Tetlock works at Columbia University in New York, not Yale University as we stated (19 June, p 20) . • In the diagram showing the monarch butterfly's migration, we illustrated a migratory pathway across the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Mexico (5 June, p 33) . In fact, this pathway has been …
Issue no. 2767 published 3 July 2010
