Letters archive

Adam Vaughan says the coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to have a significant direct effect on climate change, but I think there is still some cause for hope, even as the impact of the infection unfolds 4 April, p 10 . My optimism is drawn from the fact that the outbreak has demonstrated that the changes …

Within weeks, covid-19 has achieved what few people could have believed possible . Governments previously focused on austerity have deluged their citizens with money, and those citizens have, for the most part, readily acquiesced to the most stringent curbs on their liberty seen outside wartime. These changes have been driven by fear: of getting the …

You email me to describe contingency plans for subscribers. New Scientist is my best source for detailed, authoritative, accessible science information in general, and as I plan to survive this outbreak, I enthusiastically support whatever measures are necessary to ensure the safety and health of all its employees and business partners. You are all doing …

In the past few weeks, I have discovered the joy of print magazines. In the cacophony of constant breaking news about covid-19, the physical medium has provided a much calmer reading experience – and, in many cases, a window into the world as it was only recently, when everything made just a little bit more …

You call the current pandemic a "once-in-a-century event" ( 28 March, p 20 ). True, that is the elapsed time since the "Spanish flu" outbreak of 1918 to 1919, but this is no guide to the future. Since then, our population has quadrupled. The United Nations estimates that it was only in 2007 that the …

You report on the beneficial effect of vitamin D on the innate immune system, our defence against primary infection with viruses such as the coronavirus ( 28 March, p 44 ). Research has shown that vitamin D protects against viral infections of the upper respiratory tract. Might this, rather than temperature, be the main reason …

Edd Gent discusses an approach to thermodynamics that may improve the energy efficiency of data processing ( 14 March, p 40 ). This reminds me of work on steam engines in the 18th and 19th centuries, which led to the study of thermodynamics. The economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons noted that consumption of coal …

Hugh Cooke is concerned by the carbon emissions of the rockets used to launch satellites to provide internet services, and the energy required to run the "internet of everything" (Letters, 21 March ). Yet pushing electrons is vastly cheaper than pushing people or goods. Granted, launching satellites is polluting, but I am convinced that this …

Richard Webb says that free will is "often seen as the opposite of determinism" ( 15 February, p 34 ). Surely, though, it is randomness that is the true opposite of determinism. It seems to me that free will is balanced on the knife-edge boundary between these states, in a way that is analogous to …

Layal Liverpool mentions modern digital voice assistants being "ready to respond rapidly to any command" in contrast to the opinion expressed by one IT expert in 1990 that speech control would be slower ( 14 March, p 27 ). It seems to me that, for most people, screen-based user interfaces are always going to be …

From From Peter Reid, Plymouth, Devon, UK Let people decide which way to cross new grassed areas, says Frank Bover (Letters, 21 March ). It has been said that, during the Peninsular war against Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 19th century, a British general called John Moore, stopped his men laying out paths in a …

I have seen Bover's idea in action at the UK secondary school that I attended from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. It had an older teaching building and a recently built modern one that consisted of interlocking square sections. The pathways around the modern buildings were laid out in wide curves connecting the …

Christel Cederberg and Hayo van der Werf say that the relationship between the lower yields of organic agriculture and additional demand for land is unclear ( 21 March, p 25 ). They point out that in Brazil, agricultural intensification coincided with increased deforestation, and say that this supports their argument. But it is clear that …

• The alcohol in wine evaporates faster than the water, and this creates a difference in surface tension and "legs" in the glass ( 4 April, p 16 ). • Germán Martinez works at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas ( 4 April, p 15 ). • Investigations continue into whether the initial level of virus that …