Letters archive

Australia had barbed-wire telephone lines that served many farms up to the late 1960s, just like those you describe in the rural US in the early 20th century (21/28 December 2013, p 76) . The granddaddy of them all was a 700-kilometre-long line in Western Australia. This was a single galvanised iron fencing wire on …

Michael Brooks is right that we need to produce agile thinkers, not just more and more science and engineering graduates, to drive an innovation economy (21/28 December 2013, p 38) . We should all aspire to a tireless variety of thinking and creativity. The arts and humanities must stop apologising in the face of the …

In 1978, a friend of mine graduated in philosophy and took a job in IT, where she had a successful career precisely because of the mental agility her degree required. In my experience people with similar degrees these days don't even make the shortlist for such jobs. A mediocre qualification in a science subject seems …

Caroline Williams reports on attempts to perfect low-fat chocolate (21/28 December, 2013, p 53) . Why do we persist in trying to replace perfectly wholesome foods with products that should probably remain in the lab? Butter being replaced by margarine and other low-fat spreads is probably the most notorious example. We should focus more attention …

Linda Geddes reports on the discovery of intergenerational memory transfer in mice (7 December 2013, p 10) . There may be other examples of the genetic transmission of acquired information. US researcher Joe Hutto raised 14 wild turkeys, from egg incubation to adulthood (24/31 December 2011, p 37) . Despite having no contact with other …

In your interview with Richard Dawkins (21/28 December 2013, p 40) he says: "I think people want altruism to be a kind of driving force; there's no such thing as a driving force. They want altruism to be fundamental whereas I want it to be explained." Quite so, but the only way to do that …

If Jesus Christ lived today and was educated in a liberal, democratic environment, I think he would be well on board with Dawkins and others of a like mind. Instead of preaching from the Bible, he would choose Unweaving the Rainbow by Dawkins and The Good Book by philosopher A. C. Grayling as examples of …

The letter from Howard Barnes about applying the label "religious" to unexplained ancient buildings (7 December 2013, p 33) brings to mind British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. In the 1950s TV show Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? Wheeler was asked to explain what a "ritual object" was. He replied that it was a term used by archaeologists …

In his letter, Bruce Dinham does economics a disservice when extolling the definability and measurability of science while alleging the reverse for economics (21/28 December 2013, p 45) . The truth is nearer to a reality where nothing is certain, not even nothing. There is no such proof as scientific proof, and even mathematical proof …

The mathematics of urinal etiquette would have been incomprehensible 50 years ago (21/28 December 2013, p 58) . Back then, if you walked into the toilets with a friend you automatically peed in a urinal next to each other, so that nobody could interrupt your conversation. If it was a trough urinal, a newcomer would …

Your article on using mitochondrial donation to create a "three-parent baby" to avoid inherited disease (21/28 December 2013, p 32) provides a solution to an old literary conundrum. In the Epic of Gilgamesh , the titular anti-hero is described as two-thirds divine. How could this be? The answer, I speculate, is that the goddess Ninsun …

• Even names can get mangled by the mighty gravity of collapsed stars. Adam Brown is the Stanford University researcher following up William Unruh's thought experiment on hastening the death of a black hole (7 December 2013, p 14) .