Letters archive

Your article on hand-drying implied that paper towels are more hygienic than air dryers (18 September, p 17) . However, the study you reported was not designed to look at how many microbes get left on the skin by different drying techniques, rather to illustrate how residual moisture left through incomplete drying transfers them to …

Jo Marchant writes about the ethical issues concerning research on ancient corpses, mentioning that philosopher Søren Holm wants people involved in such work to think about whether their endeavours are "motivated by scientific inquiry or simply by curiosity" (11 September, p 17) . Holm seems to forget that curiosity is the root of scientific inquiry: …

Whenever I read an article about the internet, and online gaming in particular, such as Paul Marks's recent offering (11 September, p 24) , it always seems to be about how it can damage our health and social life. There is another side to this debate, however. I have Asperger's syndrome, and as a result …

Donald Fabian expresses confusion at changes over time to the levels of blood cholesterol considered acceptable, and the link between coronary heart disease and high blood cholesterol. In his response, William Neal of West Virginia University states that "mortality from heart disease is influenced by many more factors than blood cholesterol level" (21 August, p …

Philologists, and others who study the roots of language, are not much taken with the idea of one early human suddenly deciding to develop names for things (4 September, p 30) . More appealing is the suggestion that the first spoken words were commands. Those who study the oldest languages have noted that the earliest …

I read the "Why your brain flips over visual illusions" article (4 September, p 14) , then the piece "Weird water lurks inside giant planets" (4 September, p 15) , only to find that the diagram of a planet's interior exhibited just the kind of perceptual visual switch discussed on the previous page. Sometimes the …

Further to your article about the idea that fever may help the body fight disease (31 July, p 42) , sweating out a cold was common practice at my military boarding school in the early 1960s. Life there was harsh enough without the misery of illness, which usually induced some form of inattentiveness that in …

James Mitchell Crowe writes about the somewhat exciting decay of celluloid materials, mentioning the spontaneous ignition of early film tapes due to the flammable nature of the plastic (19 June, p 42) . The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California, devotes a room to the magician Ricky Jay's collection of decaying celluloid dice. …

One can be forgiven, I think, for becoming bemused at the number of items in cosmology we have to accept on trust. We have dark energy and dark matter, and many particles for the Large Hadron Collider to discover. Every known particle has, we hope, an elusive supersymmetric partner to find. Then there is the …

• We erroneously attributed to Thomas Frost the statement that sheep and goats cannot interbreed to produce viable offspring unless the embryos are genetically manipulated. The statement should have been attributed to the writer of the letter in which it appeared, Juliet Clutton-Brock (4 September, p 27) . • Nick Ashton is at the University …