Letters archive

In Michael Brooks's "Easy rider" (28 May, p 44) he wrote, "it is clear that a near-perfect design evolved decades ago". Evolution as a metaphor is perhaps a little off, given that marketing, new materials and the restrictive rules of international cycling have exerted powerful "non-evolutionary" effects on the design process. Even so, surely the …

Ocean engineering authority Chiang Mei, quoted in the story "Wave dismantler could shield coasts" (4 June, p 14) , has been the voice of breakwater reason since at least 1978, when he predicted the failure of the huge breakwater in Sines, Portugal. Wave-modifying theories, such as the invisibility cloak principle, can be adapted to water …

I read with concern the story on energy-related carbon dioxide emissions hitting a record high last year (4 June, p 6) . It looks like Germany has just decided to focus on burning more coal and gas for political reasons. Opportunists such as the German chancellor Angela Merkel keep repeating words like "renewable" to disguise …

Pat Shipman's concept of the domestication of animals by humans (28 May, p 32) overlooks the fact that it would certainly have been a two-way street. Wolves, for instance, were not passive agents upon whom domestication was imposed. They launched themselves on this pathway because, being opportunistic omnivores, they recognised the activities of humans as …

I read Kirsten Weir's article on childhood memory (30 April, p 42) with interest. It is not hard to understand why "most people remember nothing from before the age of 2 or 3". Most things that happen to a baby are not individually memorable. Being bathed, fed, changed and put to bed belong to short-term …

In his letter, Michael Phillips suggested a solar furnace could focus sunlight into a beam to power a plasma-engined rocket (28 May, p 31) . Unfortunately, solar furnaces cannot focus sunlight into a beam, they focus it into an image of the sun at a single focal distance. The sun subtends an angle of 0.5 …

The continued use of a stylised steam train on road signs warning of a rail crossing is not quite as anachronistic as Feedback would have us believe (14 May) . The reality is that there has not been a single year, let alone a decade, in which there has been no steam traction running on …

K.T. van Santen writes that both tomatoes and trees have short-term carbon cycles, but goes astray in conflating the two (4 June, p 35) . Almost every carbon atom in a tomato plant and its fruit will be oxidised within a year. Trees continue to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere for as long as they …

Fred Pearce questions the Borlaug hypothesis (5 February, p 26) , that agricultural intensification could save rainforests from further destruction to create farmland. We cannot rely on farmers at the borders of our diminishing rainforests to voluntarily maintain the status quo. Rich countries and the UN will have to motivate governments that control rainforests to …

Ernest Lucas sells science short when he suggests that philosophers or theologians will be able to tell us the origin of the quantum vacuum (4 June, p 34) . Suppose that science could not answer this question. Does that mean we can simply make up an answer and insist it is so? That is what …

On the use of words in meanings different from the original (Feedback, 28 May) , it is worth correcting the "typist's" mistaken belief that cc stands for carbon copy, as its use pre-dates this. It is the Latin duplication of the initial letter of a noun to indicate plurality. The Latin copia was, in medieval …

Pity bats and other cave-dwelling animals if sound waves are blasted into caves in order to map them (4 June, p 26) . Marine mammals are having a hard time with noise pollution in the oceans, particularly from the military; surely bats will fare little better with bangs in caves.

Cedric Mims points out that rodents consume a considerable proportion of food crops (4 June, p 34) . I don't know how much of the world food crisis is caused by the African cane rat, but I do know they are delicious when barbecued. They are big and meaty and very tasty. It's one way …

• In the "Mind readers" feature (28 May, p 40) , Hans Berger's invention was the encephalograph.