Letters archive

The suggestion that high levels of infectious disease inhibit the development of democracy (21 May, p 34) runs counter to social and medical history. First, the emergence of epidemics and pandemics followed the steady concentration of people into cities, continuing in Britain, for example, up to the era of Victorian slums. Secondly, before the late …

The discussion of the probability of the existence of inhabited planets beyond Earth in your "Instant expert" on astrobiology ( 7 May ) falls into the trap of conflating habitability with inhabited. It speculates that 1 per cent of small rocky planets are "habitable" and continues as if life has inevitably emerged on them. A …

I enjoyed Colin Pillinger's article (21 May, p 38) about evidence from Martian meteorites that could hint at life on that planet. However, I was disappointed that he did not mention the controversial results from one of the Mars Viking mission's biology experiments, which looked for chemical signatures of life in Martian soil samples. He …

Your editorial "Life's endless possibilities" (14 May, p 3) stated: "We need to spread our search for alien life as imaginatively as we can." I disagree. Given that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth, or so cosmologists tell us, it is unlikely that terrestrial life is unique. The …

I believe the Somerton code (21 May, p 40) was in fact an attempt by a dying man to compose his epitaph, influenced by the Persian verse of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam . This book was found nearby, and much of it is concerned with passing on from one life to the next. I …

New Scientist reported that wind turbines are one of "Japan's energy options in a non-nuclear future" (21 May, p 10) . They would "operate a quarter of the time" that is to say with a load factor of 25 per cent , just as wind turbines do on our own island, which is also on …

Roman emperors never used the thumbs-down signal to mean the death of the losing combatant in the gladiatorial arena (Feedback, 7 May) . As it says in QI: The book of general ignorance , thumbs up signified death (like a drawn sword). Sparing the defeated was a closed fist with the thumb tucked inside (like …

The teachers I work with would not teach students that atomic weights were fundamental constants of nature, which is clear from "The periodic turntable" part of your "When science gets it wrong" feature (21 May, p 28) . Students are, however, likely to learn "bad science" by using the word "weight" (a force acting on …

The article "The rush towards renewable oil" (21 May, p 6) could have included estimates of the efficiency with which the photosynthetic alkane-producing microbes convert energy in sunlight into mechanical work. This is important because, although we must eventually rely on conversion of solar radiation for most of our transportation energy needs, there are many …