Letters archive

I write regarding Adam Vaughan's excellent article on why the UK has one of the highest death rates per million from covid-19 in Europe ( 6 June, p 8 ). I live in Berlin, where face masks have been mandatory for more than a month on public transport, in shops and in any place where …

I have made a " corona hat" so that I can keep my distance from my fellow citizens. It is very simple and cheap; the hat uses a reversing sensor from a car mounted in half a globe and is powered by batteries from a broken robot vacuum cleaner. The sensor cost €20 and the …

In your interview with World Meteorological Organization head Petteri Taalas, you consider the positive impact of the covid-19 pandemic on reducing carbon emissions ( 30 May, p 30 ). This crisis has given governments a great opportunity to reduce emissions, but whether they will capitalise on it remains in doubt. We must also consider how …

I was pleased to see the variability of human appetite explained as a combination of five separable components related to key nutrients ( 23 May, p 30 ). Could I suggest an amendment? About a decade ago, I was monitoring my own nutrition and thought it would be interesting to compare it, in some detail, …

I was stimulated by your article on searching for meteorites in Antarctica and a thought occurred to me ( 30 May, p 41 ). Could meteorites landing on Antarctic glaciers make their way to the ocean? While many would travel with icebergs into the open seas, a significant proportion would be deposited near where glaciers …

Sam Edge offers us the perfect example of the problem of consciousness ( Letters, 30 May ). He is colour-blind, but I am not, so I can never comprehend his subjective experience of seeing a rainbow, nor he mine. All the optical and neurological science in the world can never change that. The matter is …

I have been following the debates in New Scientist about whether we are all living in a simulation ( 6 June, p 30 ). It would certainly explain some of the cosmological issues that we are still struggling with, those highlighted in the recent article by Jim Peebles, "Have we got the universe right?". We …

In "Is reality a simulation?" by Nick Bostrom, republished as an extract from your Essential Guide: The Nature of Reality , he ponders the question posed in the headline. To answer yes, it would have to be possible to create a computer simulation that includes self-conscious entities. It may be possible, if extraordinarily difficult, to …

In your online story about spoofing the Automatic Identification System (AIS) of ships, you state: "There haven't been any known accidents due to the spoofing, but ships rely on AIS to avoid collisions, so there is the potential for major disaster 13 June, p 19 ." As a merchant ship captain, I can say that …

Dwight Hines suggests that court transcripts could be a source of training material for a linguistically based lie-detection algorithm Letters, 6 June . I offer the pronouncements of our top politicians and their aides with respect to the pandemic and to climate change as a much richer seam of data to mine for this purpose.