Letters archive

The pursuit of science in Antarctica has continued to come at a cost to lives ever since Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions died on their return from the South Pole still hauling 15 kilograms of rock samples (14 January, p 24) . From the time the British established a permanent research presence in …

The strength of compressed paper balls mentioned in your feature (24/31 December 2011, p 78) is probably produced by various polyhedra created during enforced folding. Tetrahedra are the strongest regular solids, and we could expect these to be formed last, at the centre of the ball. The earlier stages of compression will contain folded spaces …

Physicist Stephen Hawking, responding to suggestions that there may be no avoiding a creation event in cosmological theories, said that "a point of creation would be a place where science broke down" and that "one would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God" (14 January, p 6) . This sounds too much …

I found Debora MacKenzie's survey of the state of thinking 40 years after the 1972 book The Limits to Growth very useful (7 January, p 38) . Any talk of relying on continual innovation to avert global collapse smacks of the growth orientation that is the very problem. What is needed is a move away …

If the internet user recognition technology being developed by firms such as BlueCava (29 October 2011, p 50) had been available to the dictators involved in the Arab Spring, those who kept the world and their fellow freedom fighters informed might well have "disappeared", and Colonel Gaddafi might still be in power. What price anonymity? …

Arturo Casadevall neatly explains why fungi colonise the cooler outside of our bodies (3 December 2011, p 50) – hence athlete's foot, not athlete's tongue. This suggests a new treatment for the condition: thicker socks.

The story on Ötzi the iceman's last meal (10 December 2011, p 10) provides a chance to correct an error that was also perpetuated in a recent film on the subject. Both sources implied that the stomach empties in 30 to 60 minutes. This is incorrect. It half-empties in that time, varying from 30 minutes …

Although I enjoyed Stuart Clark's look at dark matter (7 January, p 30) , I couldn't help being struck by the somewhat blinkered conclusions. All is not lost if elementary particles do not make up dark matter. Only a few months before, New Scientist carried a carefully worded feature by Marcus Chown about my own …

Regarding your ultimate guide to the multiverse (26 November 2011, p 42) , it looks like Terry Pratchett was right: somewhere in the multiverse there is Discworld, supported on the backs of four elephants, standing on a giant turtle swimming through space.

Why, in times of austerity, are scientists around the world rushing to solve the mysteries of the cosmos (7 January, p 8) ? If an answer is not found for 200 years it does not matter.

Can you please stop using the phrase "save the planet" (17 December 2011, p 28) . There is no way the human race can destroy this planet, though this planet can destroy the human race, no problem. In this case, what you meant was "save the human race", or civilisation, as the story later made …

Your look at icicles (24/31 December 2011, p 60) reminded me of a spiral form I spotted. It had made one-and-a-half turns by the time I saw it. Water dripped down from an overhang onto a sprig of heather. This was next to a remote lane at a bend where the wind blew constantly, making …

The cartoon with the letter "Grounded chimps" in your end-of-year issue (24/31 December 2011, p 43) depicts apes sleeping on the ground, but I sincerely doubt that this progenitor of humans actually had a tail. After all, neither Lucy, the 3-million-year-old hominid fossil, nor present day chimpanzees, have a tail.

My niece has been showing me her collection of model ANIMALS. She says that some have CLAWS, some have PAWS, though she does not like their JAWS, and the monkey, like the letter Q, has a tail. In the box, replace the 10 letters in the four words and one letter that I have written …