Letters archive

How do I know I exist (23 July, p 36) ? 1. Sit at desk. 2. Open drawer. 3. Put fingers in drawer. 4. Slam drawer shut. Yep, I exist. From Ian Stewart, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick Central to answering the question "Am I a hologram?" (23 July, p 31) is the holographic principle, …

Andy Coghlan reported the latest evidence that Alzheimer's is, in part, a cell cycle disease that generates neurons and other cells with abnormal numbers of chromosomes (14 May, p 8) . We would like to supplement this story by pointing out that the vast majority of abnormal neurons and other cells in people with Alzheimer's …

The internet will never become the "splinternet" (16 July, p 42) . To understand why, remember that there were splinternets before the internet. It was the internet that swept them aside, not the other way around. The importance of the internet lies in its connectivity, not content, despite what some corporations fondly believe. There were …

In her article on the mental lives of animals, Emma Young wrote, "Chimps... just don't get abstract physical concepts, like weight, gravity and the transfer of force" (2 July, p 41) . She cited work by Daniel Povinelli, in which a group of orphaned, institutionalised chimpanzees often failed to select a tool with the correct …

Reading how contrails from second world war bombers changed the weather (16 July, p 14) brought to mind the flight marking the 10th anniversary of the wartime 1000 bomber raids by the UK's Royal Air Force. I was living in west London, near Northolt airfield, and the weather was fine, clear and very warm. A …

South Africa's efforts to increase its scientific capabilities should be applauded (16 July, p 25) . However, the decision on siting the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's biggest radio telescope, should be made in the best interests of science, not to foster scientific development in any one region. Whilst South Africa is a stable …

In "Unsung elements" (18 June, p 36) James Mitchell Crow states they "make up a few parts per billion of Earth's crust". While correct for one of the nine – tellurium is about 1 part per billion (ppb) – he is way out with the others. With reasonable confidence, their crustal abundances are: indium 200 …

After reading of the connections between words and sensory perceptions and possible links to the emergence of language (16 July, p 30) , I suspect that "the ancestral genius who invented the first words" was female. I can see language developing out of a game played by mothers and their babbling, curious children, with mothers …

The real fault with lie detectors (25 June, p 46) is the assumption that lying is stressful. It is for most of us, but for sociopaths lying is no problem. Career non-sociopathic criminals are another matter, though they soon learn tricks, like a drawing pin inside the shoe. In the 1980s, my colleagues and I …

I was delighted to read Alan White's thoughts on why being male is so bad for health (18 June, p 31) . I have been irritated by the way feminist social scientists, among whom I count myself, often explain women's higher rates of illness in terms of social factors, but men's higher rates of mortality …

There appears to be a backlash against calls to replace pi with tau (9 July, p 5) . After reading The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl ( tauday.com ), I took the document's advice and did a review, looking back through my engineering and physics books. I was dumbfounded at how often 2pi showed up …