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10 November 2021
From David Aldred, Elloughton, East Yorkshire, UK
Veganism isn't about human health, it is about animal health: if you don't breed, enslave, slaughter, skin and eat animals, they tend to stay healthier ( 30 October, p 38 ). Your article never mentions that veganism isn't just about food, but also clothes, make-up, hair products, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, weapons and pretty much everything else. …
17 November 2021
From Terry Cannon, University of Sussex, UK
You quote Saleemul Huq saying that the $100 billion a year of "climate finance" meant to be pledged to support low-income countries is a "trivial" amount ( 23 October, p 36 ). He is right. To indicate how trivial, note that the UK government has budgeted half that for its covid-19 test and trace system …
17 November 2021
From Andrew Smyth, Los Angeles, California, US
Your article on quantum reality mentions a "superposition" of states, which means a particle can exist in all possible states at once before it is measured or observed ( 6 November, p 38 ). Researchers hope to do an experiment on a crystal 100,000 times more massive than used before to demonstrate quantum behaviour to …
17 November 2021
From Robert Sebes, Sydney, Australia
"The vegan health illusion" doesn't discuss vegan diets in general, only highly processed vegan "junk" food, mainly plant-based meat alternatives ( 30 October, p 38 ). No health-conscious vegan will live on a diet of these products. Possibly the main consumers are people who have swapped meat-based junk food for vegan junk food. The simple …
17 November 2021
From Thoby Kennet, Brighton, East Sussex, UK
Your story on space junk notes that the untrammelled and exponential growth of the number of satellites in Earth orbit, largely for private profit, stacks up problems, known and possibly unknown, for the future ( 30 October, p 42 ). When once useful artefacts, designed with a limited lifespan in mind, outlive their utility, they …
17 November 2021
From Ken Russell, Aberdeen, UK
Your picture of offshore wind turbines shows an interesting phenomenon ( 16 October, p 12 ). At the time the image was taken, the tide must have been running from right to left, as verified by the turbulent wake at the base of each turbine. Has anyone thought of retrofitting water turbines to the base …
17 November 2021
From Roger Gifford, Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia
Graham Lawton suggests the time may be ripe to introduce tradeable "personal carbon allowances" to ration greenhouse gas emissions incurred by our spending ( 23 October, p 26 ). It is also ripe for broadening this concept. Besides climate change, other global environmental onslaughts are beyond the reach of market forces alone to address: toxic …
17 November 2021
From Ralf Buckley, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Models of consciousness that you detail don't explain why evolution of biological information processing should create conscious subjective experience ( 4 September, p 44 ). One possibility is that subjective experience is a mechanism for continuity of processing under a biological constraint – the timescale of transmission across synapses . This is substantially slower than …
17 November 2021
The five graphs in "Who is tackling climate change best?" ( 30 October, p 10 ) should have stated emissions in millions of tonnes of CO 2 equivalent.
24 November 2021
From David Myers, Commugny, Switzerland
Quantum mechanics doesn't predict that the moon isn't there when you aren't looking at it, but that you can't simultaneously measure its position and momentum (and other properties) with absolute certainty. However, the uncertainty is defined by Planck's constant, which is so small that the effect is insignificant for visible objects.
