Letters archive

I should like to add some nuance to Dan Falk's fascinating article on the possibility of advanced civilisations beyond Earth ( 3 October, p 36 ). The assumption behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that such intellect is likely to be used to develop technology, but this isn't inevitable. The cultures of both classical …

Finding what is probably a sign of life in clouds on Venus ( 3 October, p 12 ) is eye-opening for anyone seeking extraterrestrials, a hint that we may be looking in the wrong places and that we shouldn't just be targeting planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone.

If advanced ETs do exist in our galaxy, we have the technology to find them: 1000 radio receivers of the same size as the Arecibo telescope may be able to detect an Earth-like civilisation up to 13,000 light years away. The real challenge for us – and perhaps for ETs – may be to persuade …

In your leader (3 October), you say that because there are so many planets, "even if the odds of life arising on a particular world are tiny, there is a good chance it has happened many times". Let's assume that there are 10 12 planets in our galaxy and 10 12 galaxies in the visible …

Annalee Newitz is right to conclude that "we are going to need better political systems" to deal with climate change, but I would go further (26 September, p 22). To deal with it, we will require unprecedented cooperation between people, industry and governments. The latter two groups will do nothing until they see which way …

After reading the rather worrying story "US science coverage is biased against people with names not of British origin", I found myself doing exactly what the article predicted: the only name I could remember was that of the Birmingham City University expert, Marcus Ryder ( 26 September, p 14 ). I had to re-read the …

I read your article on precision nutrition with great interest ( 12 September, p 34 ). It suggests that dietary response is, in part, associated with microbiome composition. Yet surely this is a catch-22, since microbiome composition is modified by dietary intake. It would seem that robust conclusions can only be drawn after long-term studies …

James Wong makes the oft-repeated claim that monocultures give greater crop yields from a given plot of land ( 3 October, p 24 ). As I understand it, and as past research indicated, monocultures enable the highest yield of a single crop from a given plot, but polyculture can generate a higher overall yield, spread …

• A picture in our exposé on the plight of giant river fish was mislabelled ( 3 October, p 41 ). Both fish on page 43 were actually American paddlefish.

Geoff Harding suggests that plummeting wildlife populations may mean humans having to deliberately take on some of their functions, like artificial fertilisation of plant species (Letters, 10 October). This brought to mind Maja Lunde's book The History of Bees , which is set against a fictional past, near present and future for bees and humans. …