Letters archive

I wonder if the "uncanny valley", the discomfort experienced when confronted by a human-like android (12 January, p 35) , could be related to the idea that our brains organise things into specific categories, such as dogs and fish under animals (5 January, p 10) ? A robot that looks human but we know is …

Your look at the ecology of mistletoe was a fascinating read (22/29 December 2012, p 70) , but it got me thinking about economics. Trees hang onto the large majority of resources in a woodland and don't share them with others, and that stifles diversity. In a sense this echoes the accumulation of resources by …

As an avid fan and one who uses the stories of Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate inference, I really enjoyed your book reviews on the great detective and his science (5 January, p 40) . In them you mention his use of deductive reasoning, which in its strictest definition means that based on the assumption of …

Mark Pagel's hypothesis about the distribution of languages, with the widest diversity found in the tropics, is interesting but I suspect it has more to do with topography than climate (8 December 2012, p 38) . The New Guinea islands are geologically young and in the early stages of erosion, with high mountains and steeply …

You report that Wikipedia is rated harder to read than Encyclopaedia Britannica ( 15 December 2012, p 27 ). Information scientists Adam Jatowt and Katsumi Tanaka attribute this to Wikipedia articles often being written by experts, who tend to sacrifice readability for accuracy. I always understood that Encyclopaedia Britannica contributors were also experts. There is …

You report that finger skin wrinkling as a result of soaking in water could be a beneficial adaptation as it gives better grip in wet conditions (12 January, p 15) . Surely this is a classic example of what author Raymond Tallis calls "Darwinitis". Not every physical characteristic need confer an adaptive advantage. A characteristic …

I worry that announcements such as those by the UK's Met Office predicting little change in the global mean surface temperature over the next five years are so readily translated into "global warming at a standstill" by the mainstream press, as you reported (9 January, newscientist.com/article/dn23060) . The global mean surface temperature is an insufficient, …

Bryant Walker Smith raises a number of legal issues surrounding driverless cars (22/29 December 2012, p 34) . But what about the elephant in the room: hacking? Doubtless we will be told that security will be tight, but it often isn't for new technology, such as cellphones. Why would anyone want to hack a driverless …

Peter Ryan's letter makes a good argument for taxing carbon emissions on the consumption rather than production of goods (22/29 December 2012, p 41) . However, recent responses to energy price and fuel duty increases in the UK are not encouraging. Environmental explanations for the underlying policy are overwhelmed by the bad press generated by …

Logician George Boolos may have solved the "hardest logic puzzle" in 1996 (22/29 December 2012, p 50) . However, a handful of students of experimental psychology at the University of Sussex, UK, cracked something similar one afternoon in 1968, aided by a few beers. Our problem was to distinguish the door that led to freedom …

Further to your look at how to avoid a scalding when carrying a hot drink (22/29 December 2012, p 65) , I find that applying a slight up and down motion to the container while walking works well. This is true regardless of container weight or distance from body.

In his letter Peter Wilson bemoans the lack of psychotherapists in the UK's National Health Service (12 January, p 29) , but there are also too few staff to care for the elderly, for dementia care, for treatment for some types of cancer, for health education – in short to provide anything like a service …

I propose that while there is uncertainty regarding the beginning of the universe (1 December 2012, p 32) the debate about it should be called the Great Origin Dilemma.

• In our photo competition (22/29 December 2012, p 77) we mislabelled image L as H on page 66. The labelling was correct in the online version, however, where the answers needed to be submitted • Enigma puzzle 1731, "Power play" (12 January, p 28) , should have been credited to Gwyn Owen