Letters archive

I have spent many years watching politicians bring ignorance, stupidity and self-interest to issues (Letters, 11 April . That said, I have to agree with Bryn Glover that some of them deserve applause for their efforts in dealing with the coronavirus. I won't be criticising their shortcomings on this given they've inherited a nightmare and …

Graham Lawton outlines three distinct options for navigating our way to a safer future: hold the lockdown restrictions for an extended period to see off the virus; build medical capacity to cope with a second wave and then ease the lockdown; or end the lockdown more rapidly but shield the vulnerable. Surely a better strategy would be to integrate all …

You reported on the question of whether warmer spring conditions could slow the virus's rate of spread 4 April, p 8 . Have any of the studies into the effects of temperature and humidity on the transmission of covid-19 taken air conditioning into account? The use of air conditioning is widespread in most wealthy countries …

Carrie Arnold explains the long road to an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine 21 March, p 44 . The creator of the rubella vaccine, Stanley Plotkin, has suggested one way to speed things up : we should bypass ordinary testing protocol and expose volunteers in vaccine trials to the coronavirus after they are given test …

Thanks for an interesting article on the green parakeets that have invaded London 11 April, p 42 . Ring-necked parakeets have been brought to the West for a long time, no doubt along the Silk Road that has been in existence for thousands of years. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin has a mosaic of one …

Perhaps one of the reasons we are so loath to take vigorous lethal action against invasive parakeets is that they remind us of ourselves. Are we not the ultimate invasive species? Modern humanity likes to live in crowds, is very noisy, wastes a huge amount of food and displaces or renders extinct quite a lot …

Regarding your review of sci-fi novel Providence, which is centred on the rise of powerful artificial intelligence: isn't what we are striving for in our AI omniscience rather than omnipotence? Only if said entity were to have agency might it be omnipotent as a result, but this is by no means logically inevitable 4 April, …

You reported on research suggesting that monkeys travelled on driftwood rafts from Africa to South America 35 to 32 million years ago 18 April, p 19 . The east Atlantic Benguela current would have helped take them to the Amazon when sea level was lower because water was locked up in Antarctic ice. Perhaps people …

You report on a study testing various popular diets, which found that they all led to weight loss and improvements in cholesterol in the first six months, although the effects disappeared later on 11 April, p 18 . Perhaps the explanation is that the gut biome isn't used to the new diet and somehow this …

Exoplanet TOI-849b has a surface area that is about 12 times that of Earth ( 18 April, p 14 ).