Letters archive

You report on the idea of making households pay for the rubbish they throw away, as a means to decrease pressure on landfill and increase recycling, without much hope of any such scheme being implemented in the near future in the UK ( 25 September, p 18 ). Switzerland has had this for decades, based …

Marta Zaraska made important points about food waste , especially from restaurants and other food outlets. One factor in this are the UK and EU bans on the use of this waste as pigswill ( 25 September, p 42 ). Pigs, and chickens and rabbits during the second world war in the UK, have always …

Ken Jensen's timely warning that heat pumps can operate on a cooling cycle in the summer should ring very loud alarm bells ( Letters, 2 October ). Unless this feature is disabled by legislation, as the UK government seeks to roll out this type of system, it is just another way to accelerate the apocalypse …

Yes, there is a need to maintain the ability to perform anonymous transactions in a free society ( 18 September, p 16 ). However, the news that the El Salvador government is accepting bitcoin – billed as anonymous – as tender is disturbing. Proof-of-work blockchain currencies like bitcoin are a bad idea because of their …

If AI is a good analogue for brains, and in particular the human brain, then it wouldn't be a surprise if increasing the power/complexity by making bigger AIs would lead to activity we would see as resembling that of the human brain, both desired and undesired ( 9 October, p 36 ). For example, as …

The question of scale as it pertains to the ability of a computer to become self-aware, a possible precondition of artificial general intelligence, has been explored at least as far back as 1966. In his book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , Robert Heinlein described the human brain as having 10 10 neurons (actually, …

Is the result of GPT-3 so surprising? Intelligence is an emergent property, so increasing the number of network parameters is almost certainly bound to increase intelligence. A key next step, already hinted at by science fiction authors, is to give neural networks vision and hearing senses. I suspect that the results will be even more …

It is interesting to observe the media and political reaction to the natural gas price spike discussed in your recent leader article ( Leader, 25 September ). This price may be one that some people see as more representative of its true environmental cost. If sustained, this should be the incentive needed to get us …

In "Young at gut", the possible anti-ageing value of faecal transplants was explained ( 2 October, p 38 ). There was a caveat that transplants from one person to another would meet "resistance from other resident flora". Might this be addressed by developing storage for early age faeces, similar to that used for sperm or …

In our look at the potential role of gut microbes in longevity ( 2 October, p 38 ), we should have said the many species of the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes groups have varied dietary preferences.