Letters archive

In her article on the science of criminal profiling (28 August, p 42) , Laura Spinney quotes studies that play the game of testing the profilers' predictions. However, the serious scientific question in criminal profiling is: what reliable inferences can be made about criminals from how, where and when they commit crimes? As with all …

In her article "Why your brain flips over visual illusions", Jessica Griggs highlights work suggesting that the superior parietal lobe (SPL), an area of the brain known to control attention and process three dimensional images, may control switching our conscious attention from one possible image to another (4 September, p 14) . She could have …

Bijal Trivedi reports that use of the vOICe device, which generates soundscapes for visually impaired people, has resulted in some rewiring in the users' brains so that some can now use sound to create qualitative pictures of their environment – effectively seeing with their ears (14 August, p 42) These observations are significant from a …

Trevor Cox reports on findings that, contrary to the lengthy ponderances of Roman engineer Vitruvius, there are no perceptible acoustic benefits to decking out rooms with bronze vases (21 August, p 44) . It is an incidental property of many vessels that they resonate more musically when struck, rubbed or blown into. The acoustician-baffling vases …

Don Patterson argues that the carbon cost of nuclear energy – or any new technology – prevents it from being as compelling a solution to the energy crisis as its proponents claim (21 August, p 26) . If the green movement had been around in about 1700, they would probably have argued that the sacrifice …

Catherine de Lange writes about the medicalisation of recreational drugs (4 September, p 8) . There is a history of such drugs being dished out to patients: ritalin is an amphetamine, and methamphetamine (crystal meth) was routinely used as a treatment in the 1960s. LSD was given to people who were diagnosed with depression and …

Help, we appear to be trapped! I and my myriad doppelgangers were reading Rachel Courtland's article on how the concept of multiple universes causes a problem for the idea of infinite superpositions in the standard model of quantum mechanics, when we came across the instruction "see Identity crisis" (28 August, p 6) . This was …

• An improbable spelling error occurred in our article on improbable ideas. Apologies to Lesley Robertson (not Robinson), curator of the Delft School of Microbiology archives, the Netherlands, (11 September, p 38) .