Letters archive

I was disappointed by your article "Between prison and freedom" (14 August, p 8 and p 5) . I can state confidently that DNA profiling, regardless of public perceptions, is not "generally seen as infallible" by forensic science organisations. DNA profiles may often be partial, or mixed (or possibly contaminated), but even obtaining a clear …

Wade Allison suggests we are being over-cautious in our safety limits for ionising radiation (31 July, p 24) . He pursues the elusive idea that there could be a safe level of radiation for the human population. But his article conflates two different issues, one scientific and the other societal. The best available scientific evidence, …

I was extremely interested in your discussion of the effects of fever (31 July, p 42) . In 1996, while working in Germany on a cancer project at the University of Bremen, I stumbled on a 1951 paper by Louis Diamond and Leonard Luhby on spontaneous remission in childhood leukaemia ( Journal of American Medicine …

In Australia, our 21 August election appears to have been totally driven by polls and focus groups. Reading your feature on neuromarketing (7 August, p 32) , I wondered when political candidates might start using this kind of technique. I was not reassured by the claim by Michael Smith at NeuroFocus that neuromarketing cannot be …

It is extraordinary that you devoted so many pages to animal cloning while failing to acknowledge the suffering it causes (Instant Expert, 7 August) . About 20 per cent of cloned calves die during or shortly after birth, and an additional 15 per cent before weaning, according to the European Commission's Group on Ethics in …

Your article on alternative rigging for rowing crews provided an interesting analytical take on a part of rowing which is often thought to be one of the dark arts (24 July, p 35) . It ignored, however, a major reason for not using many of the rigs illustrated in the article. This is that the …

Philip Ball's article on the universality of music touches on the debate over a purported universal preference for consonance, quoting Josh McDermott as saying that some non-western cultures use what a westerner might consider "dissonant tuning" (8 May, p 30) . This dissonance sometimes matches the special timbres of the instruments involved, such as those …