Letters archive

I share Niels Morling's concerns about the UK government's decision to close the Forensic Science Service (8 January, p 5) . We will lose our forensic science flagship, with its legacy of excellence spanning decades, particularly in the DNA field where it has contributed so much. The UK will be left with no clear focus …

Irving Kirsch warns that in double-blind drug trials the ability of doctors and participants to correctly guess whether a placebo has been administered may invalidate the results of the studies (11 December 2010, p 30) . What is not clear to me is how this affects the placebo effect. Surely the participant's level of uncertainty …

Michael Brooks lends credence to the story that Einstein's theory of relativity was a response to the alleged failure of the physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley to measure the ether drift (23 October, p 32) . The physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, in his book Personal Knowledge , exposes this as a myth, …

Steven Sherwood and Matthew Huber predict that global temperature increases will cause heatwaves that will make regions that already have high heat stress uninhabitable (23 October, p 36) .The implications of their conclusions are particularly dire for those of us inhabiting temperate regions. Heat exchange between an organism and the environment is complex, consisting of …

The article "Dawn of the plantimals" by Debora MacKenzie and Michael Le Page (11 December, p 32) points to a biotechnology that could have awesome potential. Equipping humans with photosynthetic ability would create a race of people who were fully independent of conventional agriculture for sustenance. Since Homo chlorensis would have to sunbathe au naturel …

I would take issue with Douglas Fox's suggestion that when chimps exhibit hostile behaviour to thunderstorms they may be confronting a "hairy-knuckled Zeus" (27 November 2010, p 32) . In the mythology of most religions, any challenge to the gods was likely to result in the challenger being frizzled by the next thunderbolt. The chimps' …

Referring to the possibility that natural selection may work at the level of entire ecosystems, your editorial described as "bleakly reductionist" the prevailing neo-Darwinian view that selection occurs principally at the level of individuals or even genes (9 October 2010, p 5) . This phrase might not be out of place in a religious publication …

I am writing to add a little depth, as it were, to Jeff Hecht's article on 3D film (18 December 2010, p 42) . Bad 3D footage can be painful to watch, but nausea and eye strain are not inevitable. The single most common mistake I see in 3D production happens at the edit points. …

Concerning the graphical approach developed for quantum mechanics to enable computers to make sense of sentences (11 December 2010, p 10) , I would be impressed if the software could make sense of Groucho Marx's statement: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." Could the software be evaluated so that we knew …

• A sponsored feature on street lighting (25 December 2010, p 11) asked for entries to a "Livable Cities Award", a competition that, as the article said, had closed on 28 October 2010. Our apologies for the mistake.