Letters archive

The idea of copyrighting music for "the world and solar system" is not as daffy as it might seem (17 September, p 72) . The crew of Apollo 9 sang Happy Birthday to You on 8 March 1969 from Earth orbit. This was televised worldwide. Few realise the song was copyrighted in the US in …

Your editorial on field trials to investigate potentially risky technologies, including geoengineering (10 September, p 3) , was right to highlight the importance of carefully designed experiments to assess their risks and benefits. Given the slow pace of efforts to reduce CO 2 emissions, and the seeming lack of international political will, we may need …

Climate change is a very serious issue and must be treated with respect and scientific integrity. In an effort to promote the sale of a very expensive book, the publisher of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World appears to have resorted to sensationalism by reporting that the Greenland ice sheet has shrunk by 15 …

Even allowing for a simplified explanation, the panoply of mistakes and assumptions in the universal intelligence test is staggering, and I would suggest glaringly obvious to anyone with a smattering of intelligence (10 September, p 42) . For example, the fact that it is untimed, because a computer would outpace a human, is ridiculous. If …

We would like to lay claim to the first quantum tidal turbine – the description of the Kepler Energy turbine in "Rising tide" (17 September, p 48) suggests that its blades "can rotate in both directions at once"! In fact, and more prosaically, the turbine can rotate in the same direction in both directions of …

I expect that all your readers, especially those in relationships, will be wondering what happened to "we" in the list of the 20 most used words in the English language (3 September, p 42) .

• In a review of Jeanne Guillemin's book American Anthrax (10 September, p 52) , the anthrax threat in the US in 2001 should have been referred to as "Amerithrax".