Letters archive

Your interview with Sugatra Mitra about children learning for themselves was fascinating ( 3 November, p 42 ). It chimed very well with research I did for a master's in education in 1989, on the role children wanted the teacher to play during group work. The 8-year-olds' conclusions were that the teacher should keep order, …

There are two ways this can end: badly and expensively. OK, just the one way @undeadbydawn reacts to UK police plans to use AI to predict whether individuals will commit violent crime ( 1 December, p 6 )

Your article on home heating made important and compelling reading ( 17 November, p 22 ). The UK is adding to its vast supply of older, inefficient buildings with new-build homes that are still the least efficient in Europe: 90 per cent of the homes the country will have in 2050 have now been built, …

Everyone has a part to play in combating climate change, and changing expectations is part of this alongside new heating systems . Since central heating became commonplace in UK homes around 40 years ago, people have become used to their homes being warm as soon as they get home. The warmer their homes are in …

I enjoyed the article on home heating and climate change , as someone who fitted a ground-source heat pump to my home well before the UK's Renewable Heat Incentive or any other renewable energy subsidies were developed. You note that UK peak demand for heat energy in the winter is six times higher than that …

Ryan MacDonald notes that in the early 1990s Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were the first to observe an exoplanet around a sun-like star ( 10 November, p 38 ). It was thought to be a gaseous "hot Jupiter" orbiting eight times closer to its star, 51 Pegasi, than Mercury is from the sun. Rocky …

I agree with Alice Bell's support for Dorothy Hodgkin to be on the new UK £50 note ( 10 November, p 24 ). Another aspect of her career is that she attended a state school, whereas each of the other 20th-century candidates mentioned – Rosalind Franklin, Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking – went to private …

• The film Anthropocene includes a scene of vast fields of lithium ore drying in the sun ( 17 November, p 45 ). • These eggs aren't so large: a human ovum is about 0.1 millimetre across ( 24 November, p 28 ).

You report that an imbalance in the gut's ability to repopulate itself with new neurons and clear out the dead ones could lead to Parkinson's disease ( 10 November, p 7 ) and that the disease may start in the appendix and travel to the brain ( 10 November, p 18 ). I wonder whether …

Guy Cox says that without a large moon there wouldn't be tides on a planet to allow marine life to progress onto land (Letters, 3 November ). But even on Earth, the tidal force of the sun is also quite strong – about 45 per cent of the strength of the moon's. So even without …