Letters archive

Your recent leader contemplates and quite reasonably rejects the idea of leaving those who refuse the offer of a hoped-for covid-19 vaccine to "their fate" ( Leader, 15 August ). An even harsher idea can be envisaged, although I don't for a moment advocate it. That would be to refuse healthcare to those who declined …

Annalee Newitz mentions that Meysam Alizadeh is working on a system that identifies social media trolls and forecasts what they will say next ( 1 August, p 21 ). It is an attractive concept and something that I would find useful, but I was puzzled by the focus on "foreign" trolls and influence campaigns. Surely …

Toby Walsh's rebuttal to those who say AIs will usurp us, as seen in the extract taken from Essential Guide: Artificial Intelligence , is refreshing in both its objectivity and its specificity ( 4 July, p 46 ). As he notes: "Even if I can make my dog think faster, it is still unlikely to …

Further to your look at social disruption amid the pandemic, two other factors affecting interaction are the inability to read facial expressions when everyone is wearing a mask and the need to distance yourself from people to a far greater extent than our cultural norms would dictate ( 15 August, p 32 ). When speaking …

A person's freedom to be unvaccinated doesn't outweigh my freedom not to be infected by the coronavirus ( Leader, 15 August ). Even if it isn't made compulsory for everyone, international travellers should be obliged to be vaccinated. Some of your readers may recall that in the 1950s and 60s there were many countries, including …

The World Health Organization has overlooked the most important group in need of vaccination: mothers. I won't dwell on the tragic consequences for a dead mother's children, but ask the mainly male policy-makers to calculate the cost to the economy of the death of a primary carer. As someone over the age of 65, I …

Your story on a device that stimulates the vagus nerve to aid language learning prompted a memory of the so-called Alderman's nerve, the auricular branch of the vagus ( 15 August, p 21 ). This seems to be the same part that is the focus of that device. It is said that vagal stimulation of …

Despite the cardiovascular benefits of avoiding excessive use of chairs and sofas, we shouldn't assume that the benefits of squatting felt by the Hadza people will apply to people of European descent in the same way ( 18 July, p 28 ). The higher prevalence among European-descended people of gene variants that lead to hypercoagulability …

The trouble with using forests as carbon sinks is that rotting puts carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere ( 15 August, p 38 ). If we really want to reduce the carbon dioxide in the air, we should harvest wood from the forests and store it, either as wood, charcoal or some other carbon-containing substance.

In your interview with Stuart Ritchie on problems in science, you quote him as saying: "People who finish their PhDs now are expected to have some astonishingly high number of peer-reviewed publications, something like 19 ( 22 August, p 36 ). A few years ago, you'd be expected to have five or six." That isn't …