Letters archive

John Etherington's criticism of the financial support provided to wind power is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the high "external costs" of electricity generation by fossil fuels and also the subsidies that these fuels receive (21 August, p 27) . The European Commission published a report in 2003 that concluded the costs of the harm …

Your editorial on the science behind shaken baby syndrome calls for new avenues of thought on the issue (31 July, p 3) . After years of clinical paediatric practice and research into pressure relationships in the nervous system, I now consider that repetitive squeezing to calm a child might lead to similar symptoms to those …

Trevor Cox's article on acoustic archaeology mentioned the debate about the intentional use of sound in prehistory (21 August, p 45) . Archaeo-acoustics is a broad subject, and there is no doubt about intentionality in the case of lithophones – rocks that ring when struck, creating drum or bell-like sounds. Indeed, Palaeolithic and Neolithic lithophones …

Reporting on Petr Horava's ideas on how to unify quantum theory and relativity (7 August, p 28) , Anil Ananthaswamy comments that the theory will be difficult to test because the "predictions will deviate from those of Einstein's relativity only at energies far, far higher than can be probed in labs today". Rather than high …

Your article debates how to recycle a space station (21 August, p 5) . I should think the enormous cost of constructing the space station would dictate that the facility be "mothballed" in orbit as a resource after its useful life. Its components could be used for future missions, a moon colony, or sold to …

The worst mistake in the thinking behind the use of DNA evidence in court is a simple one of mathematics (21 August, p 8) . Say that a court is told that there is a 1 in a million chance that the DNA matches someone apart from the suspect. If we assume that gender can …