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18 January 2012
From Dennis Meadows, University of New Hampshire
Your article "Doomsday book" (7 January, p 38) is one of the very, very few critiques of our work, The Limits to Growth , which clearly states our goal was to understand the dynamics of growth in a finite world rather than simply to predict collapse or provide a litany of various limits to physical …
18 January 2012
From Sepehr Ehsani
In reviewing Brian Clegg's book How to Build a Time Machine Manjit Kumar discusses the theoretical limitations of time travel (10 December 2011, p 52) . Clegg ponders the absence of time-travelling guests at an event they were invited to in 2005; this may be a harbinger of our own fate. We have developed unprecedented …
18 January 2012
From Doug Legge
In response to Paul Root Wolpe's call for a unifying symbol to rally all scientists (7 January, p 24) , my offering is a stylised question mark, where the hook part looks like a light bulb, and the full stop has been made to look like the screw fitting of the bulb. I believe this …
18 January 2012
From Raphael Lee
Having used interactive digital media all my life, I can confirm the reality of game transfer phenomena (GTP), in which in-game behaviour seeps into everyday life (24/31 December 2011, p 76) . My first experience was more than 10 years ago. I spent lots of time and effort creating a detailed picture with Microsoft's paint …
18 January 2012
From Barry Adams
Stuart Clark may be looking for dark matter under the wrong name (7 January, p 30) . The idea that the universe contains a complete but invisible copy of ordinary matter dates back to 1957, when Chien-Shiung Wu discovered that the weak nuclear force, one of four fundamental natural forces, only interacts with left-handed particles. …
18 January 2012
From Jacques and Dominic St Clair
We can confirm the work of Brian Wansink and colleagues on buffet consumption (24/31 December 2011, p 50) from observations at a recent family event. As the first plates appeared on the table, a number of large, round shapes appeared in the gloom at the other end of the room. As more food was added, …
18 January 2012
From Gren Yuill
You wrote that Microsoft's "Kinect gaming sensor... helps calculate astronauts' weight in zero gravity" (24/31 December 2011, p 16) . I could do the same thing for only half the cost of Kinect. My device is a card with "zero" on it. Astronauts can read it whenever they want to find out what they weigh. …
18 January 2012
• In the editorial "A blockbuster year" (24/31 December 2011, p 3) , we should have said William Goldman wrote Hollywood memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade .
Issue no. 2848 published 21 January 2012
