Letters archive

Those familiar with the scientific method may be puzzled why many parents of autistic children seek interventions and therapies with no evidence base (26 June, 42) . However, it is not so surprising when you consider the context of autism and parenting. For decades, parents have been told that they are the cause of their …

In your article on the search for the Higgs particle, it is implicitly assumed that the Higgs exists (24 July, p 8) . This hope is shared by many physicists, and it was one of the main motivations for building the Large Hadron Collider. However, a small group of physicists, myself included, is challenging this …

Your article on the origins of cooking suggested that early humans acquired a taste for food that had accidentally fallen into a fire, and that they then learned to control fire to cook (17 July, p 12) . Could a taste for cooked food have started among people living in geothermal areas? I imagine that …

In his article on geoengineering solutions to climate change, Clive Hamilton criticises our promotion of "market-driven solutions" (17 July, p 22) . Here at the Carbon War Room, we are monitoring the debate on geoengineering, but are primarily focused on the 50 per cent of climate change solutions that can be implemented profitably using existing …

Reg Clough is sceptical about Christine Kenneally's assertion that the language Lao, which is spoken in Laos, has no adjectives (24 July, p 26) . But it is Clough who is wrong. In my reference grammar of that language, based on 17 years of fieldwork, I show that Lao has a full complement of property-denoting …

In his article about the consequences for the planet of eating meat, Bob Holmes says that grain-fed beef cows emit 24 kilograms less methane per year than grass-fed beef cows, and therefore have a lower environmental cost (17 July, p 28) . While this is true, research by scientists in New Zealand ( bit.ly/afvZml ) …

The suggestion that we could be living inside a black hole (24 July, p 9) echoes work done by the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel in the 1940s. Gödel demonstrated the existence of paradoxical solutions to Albert Einstein's field equations in general relativity, in which a rotating universe would allow time travel. This even caused Einstein …

The piece "A sprinkling of doubt" (1 May, p 22) demonstrates the degree to which advocacy and subjective opinion continue to dominate the debate over salt and health. Without referring to specific publications, the authors attempt to cast doubt on researchers who have published papers contradicting the need to reduce our salt intake by linking …

• Our neurons were clearly misfiring when describing one of four illusions we used to show how synchronisation of neurons affects vision (10 July, p 28) . The brighter centre in circle C is in fact down to an increase in the firing rate of neurons, not tighter synchrony. • In our story on biometric …

I was immensely entertained by Paul Marks's article about the Pentagon's plans for an airplane-submarine hybrid (3 July, p 32) . He correctly cited Boris Ushakov's 1934 design as an antecedent, but there is another, earlier one. The cover of Modern Mechanics for September 1930 (see photo, right) depicts a drawing of a flying sub …