Letters archive

Falling birth rates will bring many social and economic problems, but are absolutely necessary for the environmental health of the planet. Loss of habitat, ocean pollution, carbon emissions and many other environmental problems have accelerated in step with population growth. With population decline, we must shift from an economic model that requires continual growth to …

Surely the problem of greater numbers of older people needing to be supported in every way by diminishing numbers of younger people will be a transient one. As more-populous older generations die off in the next few decades, they will be replaced by smaller, later generations and, in a relatively short time, a new equilibrium …

I can easily envisage a world of healthy, happy older people where everybody is active and works until they are 80 and old age is seen as being in your 80s and 90s. The hard physical work would, of course, have to be done by younger adults, with help from robots, but the less arduous …

Eco-anxiety is a new concept, but it is closely linked to another known as solastalgia , which The Lancet included in 2015 as a term related to the impact of climate change on human well-being. It defines the set of psychological conditions that occur in a population after destructive changes in their territory, whether as …

Could it be that parental overuse of smartphones, rather than their use by children, has something to do with the increase in anxiety in young people? There is a lot of evidence that attuned noticing by and interaction with attachment figures is crucial to child development and mental health. Parents matter more than school, peers …

Focusing on the physical palaeo-anthropological record in the story of how human childhood and adolescence became so prolonged neglects what is perhaps the lengthiest task a child has: mastering language. It takes around 20 years for an acceptable competence to embed itself in the neuro-architecture of our brains and to acquire enough factual and conceptual …

In your look at anxiety in children, you mention Rebecca Anthony's finding that lower socioeconomic status is the highest risk factor. Put that together with personal satisfaction being influenced by those around us — we feel worse off as the gap widens between what we have and what we see others have — and we …

Your coverage serves as a warning on rising stress and anxiety. We are all more worried than we used to be. Work is done with machine-like efficiency. There is a growing feeling of not wanting to keep people waiting. Those behind us in queues at supermarkets and cash machines make us feel hurried. Maybe we …

In "Multiplying the multiverse", the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum world is illustrated with an example where a decision is made — in this case whether to choose tea or coffee — and this "decision" causes the wave function to collapse. I was under the impression that it was "observations" that did this job. Are …

So every time I choose tea or coffee, a new universe is produced. The observable one I inhabit has a mass of 10 53 kilograms, so every time I make a decision, I make this many more kilos. Really?