Letters archive

The point of the work of Norman Borlaug, the pioneer of the green revolution, was to feed hungry people. Fred Pearce misses points about this while accusing others of doing the same (5 February, p 26) . Borlaug observed that intensification of farming had the spin-off benefit of saving more forest than did cultivating additional …

You describe a smartphone application that could improve sound quality at music festivals (19 February, p 23) . But it could also provide a possible solution to a major problem experienced by the elderly: difficulty in hearing the high-frequency sounds of voices. As people age, their ability to hear higher frequencies deteriorates: the elderly struggle …

I am fascinated by the idea that perfect pitch could be an ability we are all born with, as described by Ed Douglas (26 February, p 46) . I believe that I developed perfect pitch as a very young child – many years before I began formal instrumental training. I remember, for example, identifying a …

As a scientist-turned-engineer, I was delighted by Jon Cartwright's "The great sound escape" (26 February, p 42) but found myself taking the wider view that most people cannot afford to install acoustic countermeasures in their private premises. Surely it is sometimes more sociable and economic to attenuate irritating sound at or near its source; and …

I was pondering why the Neanderthals might have died out. Close inspection of New Scientist 's illustrations past and present suggests the cause was a singular lack of females.

Having read the recent article on how to tell when numbers lie (12 February, p 40) , I was ready for the statistics in "Portrait of the psychopathic brain" (19 February, p 32) . This reported that between 15 and 35 per cent of US prisoners are psychopathic and 1 per cent of the country's …

Who on earth would want to incur the expense and effort of installing accelerometers in beehives to predict swarming (19 February, p 17) ? Swarming occurs when the queen bee runs out of clean comb cells in which to lay eggs. All that is necessary to prevent swarming is to ensure that the worker bees …

Michael Forbes wonders whether the Queen song that his car's Sync software insists on calling Radio Gallium Gallium should be attributed to Freddie Hg (Feedback, 15 January) . I am compelled to tell you, as many diehard Queen fans would, that the song was in fact written by Roger Taylor.

Some people have just marked 14 March as "pi day", since the date is written 3.14 in the US. British readers who missed it might like to celebrate on approximately 22 July – 22/7 in UK notation.

• The battery to activate a radio after 100 years in a sealed nuclear dump involves firing a magnet along a rod through a coil, charging capacitors in the process. It does not pass through the coil once, as we stated, but is repelled by magnets at each end of the rod, sending it back …