Letters archive

In his forthcoming book, Julian Baggini (12 March, p 34) will probably address the fact that we each at different times experience our "self" as first person singular – "I", as first person plural – "we", and even as second, or sometimes third, person. And the first person is experienced differently in different tenses: I …

How refreshing to see Richard Bergman suggesting an alternative to the body mass index (BMI) of obesity, which makes muscular men anxious (12 March, p 31) . Back in the 1970s my colleagues and I discovered that there was a weirdly accurate correlation between the incidence of coronary disease in the UK and the ratio …

Over the past 20 years we seem to be getting a double whammy of disasters – the climate-related alongside an apparent increase in the frequency and severity of earthquakes. Are they linked? There is debate over whether glaciers melting and releasing pressure on the Earth's crust contribute to earthquakes. Another factor in their frequency could …

So what makes humans different from our nearest relatives is that we have lost some regulatory DNA (12 March, p 3 and p 6) which controls how genes are expressed. This may help revive a century-old theory. Louis Bolk, and later Gavin De Beer, Desmond Morris and Stephen Jay Gould, observed that human beings have …

Colin Barras described a connection between unicellular animals and cancer cells, which suggests that cancers may lie at the origin of the animal kingdom (12 March, p 12) . Fifty years ago, I came across the suggestion that the rapid proliferation of undifferentiated cells that a lizard needs to grow a replacement tail was similar …

Absolute pitch is not "the secret of musical genius" as your cover proclaims (26 February) . Real music in natural settings is concerned with relative, not absolute, pitch. Your mates in the pub start belting out Roll out the Barrel beginning with and ending on any old pitch, and you're expected to sing along successfully. …

Roger Highfield's observation that the return journey feels faster than the outward (19 February, p 34) might also apply to animals. Our (rather overweight) cat likes to follow us on our occasional night walks along the river near our home. Once we leave his familiar territory he indicates his increasing distress, as his pitiful miaows …

Is SUSY dead or missing as your headline asked (19 March, p 10) ? Nah, she's not coming to the party until those with what you dub "baited breath" use a good mouthwash. Presumably they're using a Large Halitosis Collider? We wait with bated breath for her arrival. The editor writes: •Our shame is unabated.

• We described nematode researcher Cori Bargmann as a "he" – our apologies to her (19 March, p 21) . • Astrobiotic, creator of the Red Rover, is no longer partnered with the Raytheon corporation (5 March, p 46) .