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11 February 2015
From Gregory Sams
As the creator of the original veggie burger in 1982, I read Linda Geddes's story on the cost of meat consumption with interest (24 January, p 30) , but I could not ignore the inherent bias towards animal protein being superior. Much is made in the article of meat being a "one-stop shop" for the …
11 February 2015
From Dan Conine
Geddes's article echoes previous ones in suggesting that we must reduce our consumption of meat through a combination of education and policy change. The consensus seems to be that scientists can only see the human animal as a mindless consumer of resources. This fits the common urban model of civilisation that increasingly isolates humans from …
11 February 2015
From Carl Zetie
Reading Chris Baraniuk's article on group investing in the housing market, I was reminded that this is not the first time individuals have banded together to finance houses, bypassing the banks (24 January, p 21) . The British building society movement, which began in Birmingham in the late 18th century, enabled newly prosperous citizens to …
11 February 2015
From Ed Prior
I have great respect for Lee Smolin's work in cosmology and physics, but I cannot accept his "first principle" that there is just one universe (17 January, p 24) . In ancient times, our ancestors believed there was only one sun – our own – and worshipped it as a deity, not realising that stars …
11 February 2015
From Douglas Cross
Fred Pearce highlights only a few of the problems posed by the UK's Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant (24 January, p 8) . While he mentions the new generating station being built at Hinckley Point in Somerset, he appears not to have noticed that there is to be another less well-publicised project, literally on the other …
11 February 2015
From Martin Murray
I read with interest Laura Spinney's article on the effect of shoes on our feet (24 January, p 40) . I immediately thought how much an hour of t'ai chi each week could do to undo the damage done by shoes. T'ai chi is done in soft slippers and uses "soft feet" – the step …
11 February 2015
From Roger Malton
An interesting extension of the ideas in Spinney's article on feet might be to research people who take part in dance activities. I'm involved in traditional dance, mainly Scottish country and highland dancing, which are high impact and involve dancing almost exclusively on the toes. Both make use of constricting footwear with thin soles and …
11 February 2015
From Bruce Skinner
Dan Jones reports a study showing that lawyers with more masculine voices are less likely to win a US Supreme Court case (3 January, p 12) . He suggests that courts might have a bias against such voices, and that if so, this bias needs correcting. This ignores a basic tenet of statistics – correlation …
11 February 2015
From Duncan Cameron
Roman soldiers defied the rules to house their wives in forts, writes Jeff Hecht (17 January, p 13) . In addition to the evidence he supplies, I would draw attention to the texts on the Vindolanda tablets, the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. These show that some women at least made their homes within …
11 February 2015
From Peter Borrows
Stuart Farrimond examines the radical treatments that could stop his brain cancer (10 January, p 10) . John Wardley, the man who designed many of the roller coasters in UK amusement parks, recounts in his autobiography the story of a girl who had a brain tumour the size of a satsuma. It was stopping fluid …
11 February 2015
From James Whalley
Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson says religious faith is "dragging us down" (24 January, p 28) . What a tremendous clarion call! But if it is true, as he says, that humans have a strong tendency to wonder about whether they are being looked over by a god, and that practically every person ponders whether they …
11 February 2015
From Tom Roberts
Hal Hodson writes about plans to launch networks of satellites that provide global internet access from orbit (31 January, p 18) . But why not use the thousands of aircraft flying around the world instead of turning to communications satellites? At any one time there are about 5000 planes over the US and 13,000 in …
11 February 2015
• We wrote that plastic fibres were up to four times more abundant in deep-sea sediment than surface water (31 January, p 28) . The true figure is four orders of magnitude greater (10,000 times more abundant). • Very thaw point: the lower blue line in our sea ice graphic (31 January, p 42) was …
Issue no. 3008 published 14 February 2015
