Letters archive

Michael Le Page writes about work towards hearing aids that monitor the user's brainwaves to tell which voice they are trying to pay attention to ( 25 May, p 16 ). This is leaping to the roof without climbing the stairs. The more urgent, and easier, task would be to redesign hearing aids so that …

Your article on food advice was unintentionally very amusing ( 13 July, p 32 ). I have read New Scientist from cover to cover since your first issue and have followed the changing, often conflicting, advice on food and nutrition. Since leaving boarding school, I have lived by the advice that "a little of what …

James Wong considers organic food only from the viewpoint that it is said to be more nutritious ( 6 July, p 22 ). But probably the most important motivator for its consumers is to avoid the pesticide residues that industrially farmed fruit and vegetables typically contain. I don't know of there yet being a requirement …

Wong describes many reasons why analysing the nutrient composition of organic and non-organic food is difficult to do. Surely a better way to look at an organic diet would be to compare the health outcomes in groups that are made up of those who primarily consume organic food and of those who don't? I have …

I read Leah Crane's article on missions to Mars with great interest ( 15 June, p 38 ). But we hear little about the potential impact of rocket launches on the climate. Astronauts frequently remind us of the fragility of the atmosphere, but is sending them to space causing the damage they warn of?

So NASA has decided to create a "commercial destination" on the International Space Station where tourists could stay in the future, with the aim of facilitating for-profit space tourism ( 15 June, p 5 ). That sounds fun: who wouldn't love to see Earth from orbit and experience weightlessness? But the problem is that space …

You present a photograph of lions climbing trees in Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya's Great Rift Valley and say that this is a relatively rare behaviour ( 6 July, p 26 ). I photographed lions doing this in Solio Ranch, Kenya, in 1995. The editor writes: This could be as a result of local …

Allow me to express my support for Feedback's comments on the metric system (Feedback, 22 June ). But though it was certainly developed in France, its roots lie with English bishop John Wilkins, who proposed a decimal system of measurement in 1668.

Michael Le Page reports that climate models may have missed major effects from clouds ( 2 March, p 10 ). Two more effects, which James Lovelock described in The Revenge of Gaia , are the effects of methane emitted from melting tundra and from underwater methane hydrate. Then there are the fires in Arctic forests …

Donna Lu reports that researchers have created a glass artificial intelligence ( 13 July, p 7 ). But their paper says only that they did computer simulations of what would happen to light inside such material. They modified the distribution of areas with different indices of refraction in the simulation until they got the simulated …