Letters archive

Climate change was the largest elephant in the room during the three US presidential debates – an evasion made all the more culpable by the devastation of New York City by superstorm Sandy soon after. Politicians and the media have been blamed for its absence from public debate, but the excessive caution of most scientists, …

Thank you for pointing out that the recent conviction of the Italian seismologists was not about the failure to predict the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, but rather about poor risk communication, and was built on an accusation of giving out "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" (27 October, p 3) . It does seem unfortunate that …

I agree with Shelly Kagan that fear of being dead is irrational (20 October, p 42) . But there is more to the fear of the process of dying than he admits to. Will I die alone? With dignity? The law will not allow me to make arrangements with my carers (if any) to help …

The goal of gathering data on landslides is to reduce deaths, says Dave Petley (20 October, p 26) . While mountaineering in Peru in 1962, I saw a massive vertical slab of rock being undermined by Glacier 511. It could have fallen at any moment, causing a landslide that would obliterate a village. Our report …

In Vlatko Vedral's excellent essay suggesting that an ultimate theory might emerge from thermodynamics (13 October, p 32) , he recalls Max Planck describing his idea that energy comes in discrete chunks as an "act of desperation". Planck also anticipated Vedral's argument. In a 1909 lecture entitled "The Atomic Theory of Matter", Planck discussed reconciling …

People handling tapes and cassettes tend to place them down flat. In my experience, data stored in this way is unreadable after just six weeks as the lower edge of the tape becomes deformed. If huge amounts of data are to be accumulated on tape (20 October, p 20) there must be a strict protocol …

We all know that wind farms benefit the environment, but it is less well known that they can produce a nocebo effect: people predisposed to dislike them experience adverse health effects due to their proximity. Kay Siddell (27 October, p 28) finds their motion so disturbing that she keeps her curtains closed and takes vitamin …

James Mitchell Crowe reports that agricultural weeding robots will be able to reduce chemical use by up to 80 per cent, by identifying the leaves of weeds and applying microdots of weedkiller to them (27 October, p 42) . He also tells us that other options are applying flame guns and lasers to burn the …

I am sure that US physicist Charles Bennett had a very sophisticated way of dismissing Maxwell's Demon (13 October, p 32) . But I still enjoy the rationale given by my professor, F.C. Tompkins of Imperial College London: "The demon must eat to do the work, eating is essentially converting glucose to CO 2 and …