Letters archive

At the end of her article on eating kangaroos, Wendy Zukerman happily tucks into a kangaroo steak, having assuaged her conscience as to the meat's origin (9 October, p 42) . However, her assertion that kangaroo numbers "have been on the rise ever since Europeans settled in Australia around 200 years ago" is a contentious …

Physics can sometimes seem so confusing. First there was your report on how Petr Horava's adaptation of Einstein's equations can reconcile dark matter, relativity, gravity and quantum physics (7 August, p 28) . And then came John Webb's results which are compatible with fundamental "constants" such as alpha not being constants at all (23 October, …

While the end of space-time may be a shocking new idea to scientists (2 October, p 6) , many poets and lyricists have anticipated it. When expressing love, they often avoid over-commitment by including the caveat "till the end of time".

There is a possible remedy to the shortage of rare earths reported by Katharine Comisso (30 October, p 14) . Why not extract these elements from the red mud waste from bauxite mining? According to a study by M. Ochsenkühn-Petropulu and colleagues, a tonne of red mud will contain a few kilograms of rare earth …

The optimism in your article on carbon capture is unwarranted (25 September, p 48) . This fledgling process is unlikely to be developed on a large enough scale in the time available to help us avert global warming. Its real function is to distract us from investing in alternative power sources and thus helps to …

The finding that regular churchgoers seem to be happier than people who are not religious (9 October, p 14) could be interpreted as supporting the adage that ignorance is bliss. While secular thinkers struggle with reality, true believers have no such problem as they blithely "know" that they have the answer. Lucky them!

In her article "Junkie food", Bijal Trivedi writes that eating junk food could be as addictive as alcohol or recreational drugs (4 September, p 38) . I, too, used to be a food junkie, and found that the best way to stop the craving was to switch to a diet of vegetables, seeds, nuts and …

After writing the excellent, myth-debunking article on omega-3 and omega-6 oils (15 May, p 32) , Sanjida O'Connell must have been terribly frustrated to see you publish a letter from Fisheries Consultant for the Fishmongers' Company, Clive Askew (2 October, p 24) which stated that consuming more seafood is the simple solution to omega-3/omega-6 dietary …

• Our description of the Hampshire tree planning test (30 October, p 43) failed to make it clear that you can only move a number on or off the end of a branch of the tree, and cannot slide one over another. • We said: "Each year, 75 million babies are born" (6 November, p …