Letters archive

Marion Nestle's article on the scrapping of Denmark's fat tax rightly highlights the scale of the public-health challenge posed by obesity (24 November, p 28) .Clearly, a broad range of evidence-based interventions are essential if we are to reverse population weight gain. As Nestle mentioned, the Danish government decided, after only a year, to abolish …

After 40 years as a beekeeper, I saw your article on extraordinary intelligence in honeybees as getting close to a truth, but not quite reaching it (24 November, p 42) . In particular, it touched on Karl von Frisch's description of the "famous 'waggle dance', the steps of which signal the direction and distance to …

Further to your coverage of the use of stem cells to recover mobility in dogs with damaged spines (24 November, p 7) , it is important to make clear that this is not a cure for spinal cord injury in humans. But it is the most encouraging advance for some years, and is a significant …

Feedback has poked gentle fun at reports describing area in terms of football pitches or Wales, lengths as multiples of a London bus, and so on, but now you're doing it in the story on tapping the electrical potential of ear cells (17 November, p 18) . The voltage in the cochlea is said to …

Contrary to Stuart Leslie's letter (10 November, p 32) , in my article on the role of deadly weapons in human cultural evolution (13 October, p 46) , I quoted theorists who suggest, not that early humans had strength-based hierarchies similar to chimpanzees, but the opposite: that they had reversed that hierarchy and become more …

The oxygen-rich environment in which we live was created by the rise of photosynthesising organisms, triggering vast climate change and an opportunity for biological diversification. So why should we limit human-caused environmental change ( 17 November, p 34 )? Surely we are only doing what comes naturally, and behaving otherwise is simply to deny the …

The interview with Lisa Harris on Savita Halappanavar's death after allegedly being refused an abortion in Ireland (24 November, p 29) prompted memories of dark days in 1950s Australia. At the time abortion was illegal and I was a trainee nurse at a Melbourne hospital. We treated women who had had abortions induced in all …

So Ran Hassin and colleagues have provided evidence that complex linguistic and arithmetical operations can be performed unconsciously (17 November, p 14) . What is striking is that this was the founding insight of the cognitive revolution decades ago. For example, in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures , US linguist Noam Chomsky argued for the …

Following your look at how autobiographical memory develops (6 October, p 36) , I would aver that all my very early memories are static images. Knowing that my father returned from the war in early 1946 when I was just over 3 years old, and that we immediately left the area where I was living …

North Korea, according to Keith Bowers (24 November, p 38) , occupies an area around the size of Pennsylvania. Hmm. I could locate North Korea easily on a map, but Pennsylvania?

The slightly revolting idea of using maggots to recycle human waste more directly back into the food chain has been known about for years (24 November, p 10) . It has been taken further, according to the traditional song On Ilkla Moor Baht'at . This describes the dangers of walking on the Yorkshire moors without …

I read your article on apparent seasonal changes in radioactive decay rates (17 November, p 42) . If I understand Jere Jenkins and Ephraim Fischbach's paper correctly, they have detected a statistically significant but tiny decrease in the rate of beta decay of manganese-54, as correlated with solar flare activity. "Aha!" say the young-Earth creationists, …