Letters archive

Australia may provide an obvious test of Robert Lustig's theory that sugar – and fructose in particular – fuels the obesity epidemic (24 September, p 35) . We do not produce much corn, so we use cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup for most sweetening. In the 1960s Australia didn't have an obesity epidemic. …

Coverage of the speeding neutrinos (1 October, p 6) has led some to ask if Einstein got it wrong. Even if it is confirmed that these particles can go faster than light, the fate of Einstein's relativity will almost certainly be similar to that of Newtonian theory – we shall continue using it happily where …

I hope Steven Pinker is right that the world is becoming a less violent place (15 October, p 30) . That said, surely such an assessment must depend on what counts as violence. Adherents of some religions consider abortion to be violence, by which reckoning our society must be one of the more violent in …

Steve Jobs's influence will unquestionably be felt for many years to come (15 October, p 3) . What has not been so widely reported is the death this month of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. While not such a public figure, his impact was no less dramatic. As the creator of the C programming language and joint …

Much evidence has surfaced supporting Roland Huntford's conclusion that Scott of the Antarctic "was consumed with hubris, which is what killed him" (1 October, p 30) . Not least is the tale uncovered by Don Aldridge in his book The Rescue Of Captain Scott . It reveals Scott's unforgivable treatment of Harry McKay, a Scottish …

I admire Steven Newton's commitment to open debate with young-Earth creationists in his comment on their attendance at Geological Society of America conferences (8 October, p 30) . But I worry that in the longer term they may want to get enough of their supporters involved so that they can elect candidates to the governing …

Your article "Time's arrow" (8 October, p 39) seemed tacitly to incorporate Immanuel Kant's ideas on why time flows in one direction. Time, Kant argued, may flow in all sorts of directions, but we are forever blind to this because we can never think about time (or anything else) in any way other than one …

Your article on metamorphosis (24 September, p 56) reminded me of a seminar I attended in the 1970s, on the reproduction of marine life forms. A very large proportion of these organisms rely on the stable, oxygen-rich saline environment of the sea to nurture and disperse their eggs and sperm. What if things got mixed …

David Robson describes research into mind-body connections, including Matthew Botvinick's discovery that a person can be tricked into believing a false hand is their own – the "rubber-hand illusion" (15 October, p 34) . He wonders about important clinical applications: "A version of the rubber-hand illusion might help the brain to accept a prosthetic limb." …

In his letter, Quentin de la Bedoyere of the Catholic Herald makes the extraordinary statement that "science, by definition, has nothing to say about the spiritual aspects of humans" (15 October, p 33) . I am sure anthropologists and medical researchers would disagree. Science can look at questions such as: Do people with spiritual belief …

I would add another idea to your list of alternatives to burial (13 August, p 44) – recycling your bones into pottery. It came to me when, on a visit to an old mill in Staffordshire, I was shown how animal bones had been ground up and burned to provide the reinforcement matrix in clay …

The smartphone would have been an even more impossible invention had Jeff Hecht tried making one using vacuum tubes (15 October, p 39) . They were the only option when I started exploring electronics in around 1940. Even if it were possible to replicate a smartphone's computing capability with them, an aeroplane hangar would have …