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Letter: For the record

Published 30 December 2008

• We reported that the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica was “about the size of Scotland” (6 December 2008, p 7). In fact, the ice sheet used to cover about 16,000 square kilometres, and Scotland is actually almost five times that area.

• To refer, as we did, to a photovoltaic panel “rated to give 1 kilowatt per square metre in peak conditions… in the UK” (6 December 2008, p 30) was a tad over-optimistic. More realistically, it would take around 10 square metres of PV panel to generate 1 kilowatt.

• The half a million people expected to buy genetic tests in 2008 (22 November 2008, p 7) is the American Society of Human Genetics’ estimate for the whole world, not the US alone.

Issue no. 2689 published 3 January 2009

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