• The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is a porpoise endemic to the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortes), and not to the Gulf of Mexico, as we suggested (22/29 December 2007, p 19).
• A. C. Grayling’s comment on the fate of conceptions should have read: “an estimated quarter of all pregnancies spontaneously terminate before the sixth week… overall about one in five recognised pregnancies spontaneously terminate before 20 weeks” (22/29 December 2007, p 76).
• We said a victim of hurricane Katrina was suing for $3 thousand billion (19 January, p 21) but the claim is in fact for $3 quadrillion ($3 × 1015).
• The correct reference for the paper describing Carlo Rovelli’s method of compressing multiple quantum events into a single event describable without reference to time is Physical Review D, vol 75, p 084033 (19 January, p 26).
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• Ardaseer Cursetjee was the first Indian citizen to be elected to the Royal Society of London, not Srinivasa Ramanujan as we said (15 December 2007, p 46).
• We mistakenly implied that New South Wales and Queensland are on the west coast of Australia (22/29 December 2007, p 10).
• The definition we gave for the word “w00t” (22/29 December 2007, p 29) was a backronym, meaning that the phrase was invented after the alleged abbreviation: w00t is probably a random interjection.
