Letters archive

With reference to Thomas Smith's letter pondering the impact of jet lag on mental functioning (18 February, p 33) , I first encountered problems on a 16-hour business flight to Japan in 1974. I took an electronic chess game to pass the time. It had 10 levels of difficulty and I could usually compete up …

One possible explanation for the strange booming sounds explored by Kate Ravilious (18 February, p 47) , which was not mentioned, is the collapse of marine sediments, although the mechanism involved is uncertain. Given the quantity of sediment deposited by the river Ganges in the bay of Bengal, this may well account for such noises …

You reported concerns about the potential use of advances in neuroscience by the military in "Mind wars of the future" (11 February, p 6) . The story began: "Wars of the future may be decided through the manipulation of people's minds." When was a war fought without manipulating minds? Normal, sane, healthy people do not …

Ian Stewart made an entertaining dash through the history of physics on the basis of seven crucial equations (11 February, p 34) . But one bit was confusing: introducing the wave equation, he refers to "beats" as a buzzing noise produced by waves whose frequencies are not in simple ratios. If two musical notes are …

Further to calls to boost the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) which looks for artificial radio signals, so it can check exoplanets (11 February, p 28) : it is reasonable to assume radio communication will eventually be superseded by a technically superior system. If sentient alien species do exist, they are likely to be …

You raised the moral puzzle of why most people would be prepared to redirect a runaway tram car onto a branch line where it would hit one person but avoid the five others it would have killed had it continued, but would not be prepared to push one person off a bridge to achieve the …

The photographs of bird nests by Sharon Beals raise questions beyond the genes of their builders ( 11 February, p 26 ). Weaver birds of Africa build huge condominiums of grass under which our ancestors may have sheltered. Perhaps they watched, fascinated, as other birds built with mud that hardened as it dried. Did we …

In his letter (11 February, p 33) , Bob Donaghy suggests the last car of a nonstop, high-speed train "breaking off" to become a tram and reach its destination. This is a variation on the "slip carriages" used in the past in the UK. In the 1950s I often had to sit in the last …

David Bowman makes a good case for introducing elephants to control invasive grass in Australia (11 February, p 29) , but I presume more dung beetles would be needed to deal with the extra dung. Would additional species have to be introduced? How about some toads to control the beetles?

Jeff Dickens, responding to my letter about a hiatus in the quest for cosmological answers, missed the point (11 February, p 32) . The science I question is to do with the massive expense of cosmology and probing for the secrets of the universe. I did not advocate the removal of the point of science, …

Reading the discussion of game transfer phenomena (24/31 December 2011, p 76) , in which player responses in video games can spill into real life, I must mention what I call the Sky+ effect. (Sky+ is a service in the UK that allows you to instantly rewind live TV using a hard-disc-based personal video recorder.) …

I am sure your claim that the first uncontrolled steam-powered flight was achieved by Simon Langley in 1896 (4 February, p 3) will be challenged by others, but it was surely predated by John Stringfellow of Chard, UK, who flew a steam-powered aircraft in a disused lace mill in 1848. The editor writes: • There …

The figures in the sidebar to your article on fuel wasted searching for a parking space (4 February, p 19) imply that the Earth has expanded 1000-fold to a circumference of 40 million kilometres and that the average American car does 24,000 miles to the imperial gallon. Good news! The editor writes: • Sorry, we …

• In the story on how prions drive evolution in yeast (18 February, p 14) , the mechanism described involves reading RNA in ribosomes, not DNA as stated in the text and the diagram.