Letters archive

Heartfelt sympathies to Graham Lawton, and thanks for his article on eco-burials. My mum has stipulated that she wants ano-frills cremation, as she doesn't want "them b*****s" to profit from her death. We can then scatter her ashes approximately where we scattered those of her beloved husband and dog( 8 October, p 24 ). Personally, …

Having read your article on insomnia, I would like to share my own experiments with making lifestyle changes in the hours before bed. Bombarding my mind with the pulsating pixels of a computer game, while consuming red wine and cheese, didn't lead to a restful night. Enjoying the warm light reflected by the pages of …

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's article on her TED talk about dark matter was very interesting. I like the idea, which she mentions, of dark matter being made up of small black holes. If these black holes were composed of antimatter, it would also explain where all the universe's missing antimatter went ( 3 September, p 28 ). …

I was interested in the research suggesting that European streetlights are becoming more blue, with all the implications for sleep that this has( 24 September, p 20 ). Perhaps when replacing inefficient sodium street lamps with new LEDs, we should be using red ones instead of the RGB LEDs that produce this blue-tinged light? They …

You report that large amounts of dark matter may lurk within Earth, and that it bounces off regular, or baryonic, matter - presumably by gravitational action( 8 October, p 17 ). Is it possible that the resulting transfer of momentum to baryonic particles might be detectable? The measurements may have to be done at very …

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein objects to naming the James Webb Space Telescope after James Webb because of his political views and, in particular, his failure to oppose discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the US in the 1950s and 1960s - discrimination that was utterly appalling( 29 October, p 28 ). She goes on to suggest renaming the …

The prospect of power blackouts and possible calls for consumers to cut use at peak times reminds me of what a waste of money the rollout of first and second-generation smart meters in the UK has been. If we had waited until these devices could communicate intelligently with high-current appliances, such as storage heaters, the …

The potential need to radically change household and business energy consumption reminded me, a neuroscience PhD student, of the "three Rs" of replacement, reduction and refinement. We are trained to apply these in the lab, but it is time they became cornerstones of all our lives, not just the lives of researchers. Replace inefficient appliances, …

The debate about whether we should spend more on reducing poverty and improving the environment - both laudable objectives - rather than sending people into space ignores the behemoth in the room: global defence spending of more than $2 trillion in 2022. NASA's budget is some $24 billion, around 1 per cent of that total. …

Graeme Hurry worries about genetic modification being used to develop crop varieties that produce "ungrowable" seed, so that more has to be bought each year. However, this has been the case with F1 hybrid varieties - which make up the vast majority of our vegetable, maize, sugar beet and oilseed crops - since the 1930s( …