Letters archive

Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex At a crucial stage in the still open-ended nuclear developments in Japan, you assigned four pages to exploring how nuclear power might be "rescued" ( 26 March, p 8 ), and only a short piece on the consequences in Japan (26 March, p 6) . You question the …

You ask why people tend to fixate on the risks of nuclear power when statistics show that fossil fuels kill more people (26 March, p 10) . I suggest the reason is not so much the deadliness of nuclear power as its ability to inflict economic damage, in particular the fear that your house, your …

Air Transport Action Group The certainty of your headline "Contrails heat more than aircraft fuel" (2 April, p 16) belies the real nature of the research on which it is based. Scientists are still a long way from agreeing on the climate impact of contrails and related cirrus cloud, or even clouds in general. The …

In your article about how to rebuild civilisation from scratch (26 March, p 40) , the diagram of the "ideal city" looks eerily similar to Ebenezer Howard's design for a "Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities" from his 1898 book Tomorrow: A peaceful path to real reform , although the scales are a little different. Likewise, …

Your article on "Homo civicus" referred to recent evolutionary changes in Homo sapiens that suggest the continual refinement of our bodies (19 March, p 36) . One additional line of evidence that wasn't mentioned is the reduction in human tooth size over the past 10,000 years, which, unlike bone thickness, cannot be a direct response …

Ed Douglas's article on why some people have perfect pitch (26 February, p 46) makes a number of credible proposals but does not mention mirror neurons. When a musician with perfect pitch hears a note played by someone else, they might go through the motions in their mind of attempting to emit the same sound. …

In his article on the nature of self, Julian Baggini says that "in the 1960s Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga famously severed the corpus callosum in several people with epilepsy" (12 March, p 34) . In fact Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen were the neurosurgeons who carried out what became known as the "split brain" …

Has anyone pointed out the delightful Freudian nature of your error in the passage: "there is a depiction of a horned bison hovering over the lower body of a naked woman that bares an uncanny resemblance to Picasso's etching" ( 12 March, p 54 )?

I enjoyed the article by Greg Klerkx about private ventures sending rovers to land on the moon in competition for the Google Lunar X Prize (5 March, p 46) . But I was perplexed by the parachutes bringing rovers onto the moon's surface pictured in the image on the opening spread. They would, I imagine, …

• Marlene Zuk is at the University of California, Riverside, not San Diego (2 April, p 32) .