Letters archive

Your recent article on functional neurological disorder shed welcome light on a common, disabling and distressing condition ( 6 April, p 28 ). But, as patients and health professionals who participated in the article, we felt let down and upset by the choice of titles in the printed version: "Mind over matter – How you …

You discuss big questions that we still must answer after making the first image of a black hole system ( 20 April, p 6 ). One of the mysteries, for me, is how the shadow of the black hole appears. I realise that the halo of radiation around the black hole itself is asymmetrical because …

You mark the UK down for keeping small coins that may carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria ( 11 May, p 21 ). But this is a step towards a cashless society. This would harm older people, poor people and those without bank accounts and would move us closer to total state-monitoring of our transactions, with the potential …

Graham Lawton, discussing ways to mitigate the effects of ageing, mentions the effect of young blood ( 27 April, p 26 ). There must be many older people who have received total or near-total blood transfusions of younger blood as a result of life-saving treatment. Do they show signs of significant rejuvenation?

It isn't often that I find myself purchasing a publication based solely on a particular article. Your piece on a cure for ageing was an exception. One day, "old age" will be vitally different to our current perceptions of it. It was nice to see big names in the field mentioned, but I was a …

My wife Valerie saw your cover announcement of "a cure for ageing" and said "yeah: die!" Perhaps her scepticism is rooted in her years of work in the pharmaceutical industry.

• David Grimaldi says he bought 75 kilograms of raw amber, not the 3600 kilograms reported by the mining company ( 4 May, p 38 ). • In our puzzle about numbers in alphabetic order, the second-last is two trillion two thousand two hundred and two (Puzzles, 11 May ).  

Adam Vaughan's article implies that older people use more energy, but the study quoted only looks at residential energy consumption ( 25 May, p 9 ). This doesn't include energy consumed outside the home – at work, school, while commuting, shopping or during any other activity that many people in the US under 60 engage …

The graph accompanying your report on renewable energy illustrates how far we are from having enough storage capacity to cover times when there is little or no wind or solar generation ( 18 May, p 15 ). There is a big dip to almost zero between 6 and 7 May, with consumption at about 25 …

You describe proposals for a space-wide web and mention the problem of space junk in orbit ( 4 May, p 44 ). But won't adding more than 15,000 satellites to low Earth orbit, used in crewed space flight and traversed by other launches, cause problems by making the selection of safe launch windows much more …