Letters archive

Tennyson Williams suggests it would be opportune to use the current Ebola crisis to convince governments in the affected region to ban the consumption and smuggling of wildlife (6 September, p 26) . We fear that in a time when "paranoia and uncertainty... drive behaviours reminiscent of those during the Black Death", as Williams states, …

Richard Smith argues that research misconduct degrades trust in scientists and causes real-world harm (13 September, p 27) . The term "peer review" is generally interpreted as the review of manuscripts for journals. However, an important goal of scientific papers is to give other scientists the opportunity to reproduce the results – or not. When …

Smith asserts that universities and other employers of researchers are not very good at gathering and weighing evidence. Since this seems to be a good part of the scientific method, perhaps that is why these institutions so often produce the dodgy papers that he is concerned about. Spring, Texas, US

Reading Debora MacKenzie's valuable article examining nation states, two questions struck me immediately concerning my own field, the literate bureaucracies of the Bronze Age (6 September, p 30) . It has long been believed that writing had its origin in the need for bookkeeping in ancient, palace-centred cultures, and the Linear B tablets – inscribed …

The mention of Sudetenland in MacKenzie's article struck me personally since my family comes from this area, and I was born in a part that now falls inside Poland. The history of relationships between linguistic groups in this region is a striking example of how a political preference for one group over others creates tensions …

Naomi Lubick highlights the issue of crumbling water infrastructure and the ideas being developed to handle it (16 August, p 38) . As one of the 16 million households in the US that relies on a well and septic system, I take issue with the idea that "nothing gets done" regarding well-water quality. This assumes …

Your article on Jupiter's moon Europa makes the point that tectonic plate subduction may deliver nutrients from comets and other sources to possible life forms in the ocean beneath the ice (13 September, p 17) . Subduction of the ice could, further, deliver oxygen to the Europan ocean. Ultraviolet light and high-energy radiation striking the …

Anil Ananthaswamy describes some key differences between the responses of babies' minds and those of adults (23 August, p 40) . Yet he seems to take little account of the most profound difference: a newborn baby knows essentially nothing of what is out there, so must interpret almost everything it senses in real time. We …

How appropriate to have an article about the importance of imagination (20 September, p 32) in the same issue as a report that "droplets" the size of Ireland form in the sun's atmosphere and fall the equivalent of one-sixth the distance from Earth to the moon (p 38) . People living at the end of …

In her article on quasicrystals, Lisa Grossman states that simple tiles with three, four or six sides can tessellate a two-dimensional surface (13 September, p 38) . I wonder if she is familiar with the work of draughtsman and artist M. C. Escher, who made much livelier shapes tessellate, including riders on horseback. Morpeth, Northumberland, …

Airlines have many more managerial and technical staff than aircraft. To require at least one of the above staff to be physically present on each flight might be sound safety legislation, especially in the context of pilotless planes (9 August, p 30) . They would thus gain a very sharp incentive to ensure that everything …

I was amused by the letters from Brian Josephson and Eric Kvaalen concerning anti-afterlife dogma (20 September, p 30) . Since when does anyone have to disprove every unfounded claim submitted by science fiction fans? To do so is like proving false the claim that a Flying Spaghetti Monster circles Earth and accepts our prayers …

Ron Barnes asks what name might be given to a neutron separated from its spin (30 August, p 31) . In the US, where odd baseball terms abound, a neutron without spin might be named a "knuckletron", after the infamous non-spinning pitched ball that curves, dips, wobbles and floats unpredictably. Downingtown, Pennsylvania, US

With regard to naming, how about an "unspun neutron" and a "neutered spin"? Boulder, Colorado, US

• Our article on stopped-light lasers pointed readers in the wrong direction (20 September, p 16) : the address for Ortwin Hess's paper is doi.org/v23 . • Contrary to our report, the eye-testing smartphone kit developed by Smart Vision Labs does not yet have a fixed price (20 September, p 21) . • We flipped …