Letters archive

Musing on your look at future trends in artificial lighting (30 June, p 42) and, in particular, light pollution, it occurred to me that maybe we are approaching the problem from the wrong direction. I accept that night-vision glasses are currently clunky, expensive and lack full-colour HD technology. But if everyone had them the need …

Kennette Benedict is right to flag up the dangers of an arms race in cyberspace (30 June, p 26) . One point I would add is that the US is once again being blasé about collateral damage. The Stuxnet virus apparently "escaped" its original targets because of a programming error. There has been no apology …

I have a suggestion for dealing with chatbots (23 June, p 45) : include something really crazy in your chat with them, but phrased as if it were normal. Maybe, "I was beheaded yesterday, but I'm feeling much better today", or "I've a friend in the US who lives at the Gettysburg Address". Or "there …

Your article exploring how simple and complex life may have emerged on Earth (23 June, p 32) presumes that it must have arisen there from scratch. Furthermore, the spontaneous transformation of chemical monomers to life, such as a simple cell, is taken for granted, provided the appropriate energy routes can be identified. There is no …

Further to Fred Pearce's editorial on the outcome of the Rio+20 Earth Summit (30 June, p 3) , the disarray in international politics that he highlighted with regard to climate change is now so potentially dangerous that no one can affect to be a disinterested observer. We are, quite literally, all in this together. Anyone …

Your article on breast cancer surgery (23 June, p 42) exemplifies the gulf between epidemiologists and doctors in their thinking about disease. To the epidemiologist it seems absurd to operate on a woman with a non-invasive ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) -a tumour in a milk duct that is unlikely to spread. As "few" as …

With regard to Steve Field's letter concerning the possible quantum explanation for disappearing socks (23 June, p 31) , this is in fact a biological phenomenon. Has he not noticed that metal coat hangers seem to mysteriously multiply? The answer is simple. Socks are a larval form of coat hanger. From Bob Millar On the …

When analysing the possible causes of baldness (16 June, p 44) , Rob Dunn barely mentions the most likely evolutionary explanation: that baldness, like adult-onset nearsightedness, is not adaptive, but happens too late to be weeded out by natural selection. Also, if baldness were an adaptation meant to increase scalp exposure to sun, this would …

Richard Fisher's look at creative processes contained an irresistible quiz (16 June, p 34) . The second challenge asks: "In 2 minutes, how many uses can you think up for a bucket?" The solution is given as: "No right answer". "No wrong answer" would surely be fairer.

There are probably few of us who pursue scientific work with no pay and no funding at all, but if open-access publishing of papers becomes universal (23 June, p 26) we will cease to exist entirely. Open access is actually a closed shop. Only those who belong to an academic establishment or research facility will …

Apart from the miserable failure of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, surely the most disturbing recent report in New Scientist was that on legislators in North Carolina debating a bill forbidding coastal managers from predicting that sea-level rises will accelerate (30 June, p 5) . And the bill was passed by the state's Senate before being …

That the ancient artists who made outlines of their hands on cave walls (23 June, p 10) were communicating something to their contemporaries seems obvious – such art was most likely the Stone Age equivalent of "Zog was here". But if the paintings were not signatures, then perhaps they were just having fun.

In his letter, Ken Green describes modern divorce as "effortless" (23 June, p 30) . On the contrary, it is a difficult, damaging and far from effortless process. There's enough social evidence to conclude that marriage for life is unrealistic. It's just unfortunate that we're not all wise enough to understand this early on.

The idea that we can truly break the link between economic growth and increased resource consumption, as some have suggested, is rightly open to challenge (16 June, p 38) . The industrial fix lasted 250 years, the green revolution 50 years, the next "breakthrough" probably 20 years, and so on. Until we come to terms …

• Feedback's recent look at food labelling (9 June, p 64) should have said that vanilla pods come from the tropical orchid Vanilla planifolia , not a tree.