Letters archive

In your editorial "Don't cloud young minds" you play straight into the hands of those seeking to perpetuate a confrontational agenda on climate change (25 February, p 3) . You cite a 2010 study, "Expert credibility in climate change" , that similarly mis-frames climate science as a bipolar confrontation. There are more constructive ways of …

Your article on computer art focused on Simon Colton (14 January, p 42) , who says his Painting Fool program will "wake up in the morning and look at the newspaper headlines" and so produce art that is meaningful to the audience, because it is essentially drawing on the human experience. I suspect the folk …

Computer-supported hyperlinks were around 20 years before Bill Atkinson's HyperCard (18 February, p 42) . The hyperlink was invented in the early 1960s by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, for a revolutionary multi-user computer collaboration system called NLS. He demonstrated the concept – and also the computer mouse and …

You do a disservice to Ian Stewart and your readers by not even labelling each of the seven equations that his witty and craftily written piece elaborate on (11 February, p 34) . You usually make a point of accompanying articles with boxes and insets that clarify points the average reader may not be familiar …

If Roy Baumeister and colleagues are correct that judges are more self-controlled after lunch (28 January, p 30) then lord help anyone who has to face a judge on the Atkins diet, which induces a state of low plasma glucose and ketosis, driven mainly by a reduction in carbohydrate intake. But for those not on …

You mention attempts to save the "cyclic" eternal universe model by allowing each iteration to be larger than the last, thereby preventing an increase in disorder per unit volume so disorder doesn't reach a maximum, which would leave us with a cold, featureless universe unlike the one we observe (14 January, p 6) . You …

I was surprised that Sally Adee, describing a "fast track to pure focus", did not mention techniques other people use for finding "flow" (4 February, p 32) . I am a biological electron microscopist: my colleagues and I are in constant pursuit of this "Zen" state while slicing material thinner than a wavelength of visible …

Accurate diagnosis is essential if one plans to follow Linda Geddes's method of accessing medical expertise though Google Scholar (4 February, p 47) . I dread to think of my fate had I done this when it diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome. I remembered some unusual bites and realised Lyme disease or a similar …

When you say "Most fish in the sea evolved on the land" you evidently mean in fresh water (11 February, p 9) – and you are once more excited about rediscovering old news. In my undergraduate days in the 1960s I was taught that marine (and other) bony fish evolved in fresh water, which is …

• The GridION device will be capable of sequencing a human genome in several hours, while the smaller MinION USB sequencing device is not designed to sequence entire genomes, contrary to the over-optimistic numbers we reported (25 February, p 23) . • The phrase "right to pursue happiness" appears in the US Declaration of Independence, …