• In our feature about euthanasia (“Last rights”, 23 April, p 46), we omitted to state that in 1997, Colombia’s Constitutional Court overturned a prohibition against assisted suicide and euthanasia for the terminally ill. However, Congress has not yet passed enabling legislation to carry it out, leaving the exact legal position in that country unclear.
• We were guilty of some diabolical proof reading of the 14 May issue. In the illustration that started the “What the hell..?” feature (p 41), the figure we gave for the time since the Hadean was out by several orders of magnitude. It should have been “4,500,000,000”. In addition, there was an egregious apostrophe in “year’s”. What’s more, in our feature about the Milky Way (p 30), the figure we gave of 7.7. million kilometres for the radius of the dark region around the galaxy’s central black hole is correct – but that is about 20 times the distance from the Earth to the moon, not twice it.
• In the article on the causes of autism (14 May, p 14) we said “Jill James published a study showing that people with autism have raised levels of glutathione, a compound that detoxifies mercury.” It should have read “lowered levels of glutathione”.
• In “Instant messaging falls prey to worms” (14 May, p 26), we called an API “a piece of publicly available code”. In fact, APIs are not code themselves but a way for programmers to hook into another piece of code and get information from it via their own program.
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• Finally, Feedback’s item about punk scientists (14 May) gave a title from the wrong medium to the latest album by evolutionary biologist Greg Graffin’s band Bad Religion. This should be The Empire Strikes First not The Empire Strikes Back.
