Letters archive

I need to explain further my call for geoengineering in the Arctic by 2013 (newscientist.com/article/dn21275) , and why it is not premature, as some suggest. In October, I organised a workshop to tackle the Arctic methane issue, inviting leading experts on various subjects. The majority became convinced that we had a global emergency on our …

Perhaps one day we will have the tools to forecast how the economy will behave, just as we forecast the weather today, as Andy Haldane suggests (10 December, p 28) . But however good such a technology may become, there is a fundamental difference between forecasting the weather and forecasting the economy. Knowing what the …

Regarding Paul Marks's look at cybersecurity at infrastructure sites such as power plants and water companies (3 December, p 25) , if every computer uses the same operating system and instruction set then there is little chance of them being secure. This is like everyone having the same door key and trying to be secure …

David Robson's article suggests English is an easy language to learn because it has so few rules (10 December, p 34) . In fact, non-native speakers have enormous problems learning to speak English correctly – because we cannot teach our language using rules. English is a language that has adopted not just words from other …

I was surprised that length of the lifeline in the palm of your hand was not mentioned in your look at predicting longevity (10 December, p 46) . In "Relationship between longevity and lifeline: a manual study of 100 patients" , P. G. Newrick, E. Affie and R. J. Corrall of the Department of Medicine, …

So Hedy Lamarr invented spread spectrum frequency-hopping radio systems (3 December, p 54) . Perhaps you could try to find out if any latter-day screen sirens are working on cutting-edge inventions. Would Scarlett Johansson be trying to work out how neutrinos travel faster than photons, or is Angelina Jolie working on the hard problem of …

Charles Sheppard's letter on erosion and flooding in the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean (10 December, p 33) highlights the need for good science in these low-lying, remote coral atolls. Hopefully the paper I co-authored in Global and Planetary Change (DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2011.11.009) , which sparked the story is a contribution to that goal. The …

Thank you for the excellent article "The many faces of the multiverse" (26 November, p 42) . It helped me to identify what lies behind my previous reluctance to subscribe to the multiverse hypothesis. I hadn't realised, but it is a feeling of guilt for having survived several incidents on the roads, and other potentially …

McGregor Cambell's interesting article on citizen banking exposed some horrors of the US banking system and pitfalls of P2P lending (10 December, p 38) . I was puzzled that he did not mention mutualised building societies, which have existed in the UK for more than a century. They provide relative security and exist for the …

The relationship between cardiovascular disease and a salty diet is well known to the medical profession (3 December, p 46) , but, as you briefly mention, it is equally well known, at least in regard to blood pressure, that some people are salt sensitive and some are not. It is not surprising therefore that many …

The food balance sheets referenced in Mario Herrero's letter on livestock and greenhouse gases (3 December, p 39) , show that foods sourced from animals in their entirety, including fish, only supply 17 per cent of global food calories, with meat providing less than 8 per cent. So it is worth repeating that livestock is …