Letters archive

The expansion of online schooling in the US (8 September, p 6) brings to mind Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan's quote "the medium is the message". It is a view that is as applicable to education as it was to television. When the graduates of mass education were needed as workers in manufacturing, schools featured …

I really enjoyed your article on neutrinos and the questions they pose for particle physics (8 September, p 30) , but surely the answer is obvious. We live in a 10-dimensional space; at the point where matter is created, antimatter forms in a slightly different dimensional arrangement. This shadow universe exerts a gravitational pull – …

Your article inspired by amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius exploring transhumanism, in which technology is used to enhance human capabilities, is interesting (11 August, p 26) . The science of bionics is making great strides as technology improves. Maybe we will soon be holding a third Olympic tournament for enhanced humans.

You report the growing take-up of radio-over-fibre technology, which can distribute wireless internet to remote locations via a single cable (15 September, p 18) . US analyst Jeff Heynen is quoted as saying that an entire town's wireless traffic could be carried by one such cable. The internet's major feature is its multiple connectivity. To …

Surgeon Hutan Ashrafian attributes Egypt's brief affair with monotheism to visions experienced by the pharaoh Akhenaten as a result of temporal lobe epilepsy (8 September, p 10) . I am sceptical of such "medical materialism", which tries to explain away religious experience as the result of altered states of consciousness due to ill health. Neurologist …

Further to your look at the rights and wrongs of athletes with spinal injuries who self-harm in order to prime their cardiovascular system for exercise (1 September, p 10) , we must accept that it is their right and privilege to use their unique physiology to overcome their unique problems.

Reading your article on touchscreen keyboards that adapt to a user's style to improve typing accuracy (2 June, p 23) left me with a question. Is this best done by software that creates a modified keyboard which is kept invisible behind the standard display, or by showing this personalised layout? The editor writes: • The …

Pondering AI consciousness, Ben Goertzel asks how close we are to creating a machine that thinks like us (8 September, p 18) . This question is misguided. For starters, we know virtually nothing about how we think. We know which bits of the brain "light up" when we perform different mental tasks, but little about …

In response to letter writer Martin van Raay wondering about spontaneous animal combustion (15 September, p 29) , a cat at a nursing home in London is said to have burst into blue flames in 1987 .

• In our interview with Joseph Bock (8 September, p 25) we accidently moved the University of Notre Dame from Indiana to Illinois.