Letters archive

When people ask me (usually in a shocked tone) why I don't carry a smartphone, I answer, half-joking, "because I teach cybersecurity". Amanda Ruggeri's excellent piece on data harvesting is a stark reminder of how this technology is being abused in the name of profit, which makes me feel a little less like a member …

We have all contributed to, and been a witness of, the birth of a now deeply entrenched business model that makes its profits from the creation, use and exploitation of our personal data. To deal with this we need governments to legislate, laws to be enforced, the media to explore, academics to research and civil …

We shouldn't mess with species names for the sake of 2023 ideas of virtue. As a coastal engineer, I was "house trained" by an ecologist friend and collaborator and learned a heap of names for coastal marsh plants and their ecology. Then some international body changed them all, reducing my ability to interact with botanists …

Regarding the fate of the genus name Brontosaurus . The specimen described as Brontosaurus excelsus in the 1870s was later reclassified as Apatosaurus , to many people's disappointment. But, in 2015, Brontosaurus was reclaimed as a genus by some researchers .

Your climate special gives us some hope that we are on the way to decarbonisation, but also leaves an impression that the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. You have to ask yourself why politicians haven't done more. For instance, a couple of decades ago, they could have ended financial incentives …

Graham Lawton mentions foods that use most water ( 26 August, p 36 ). Vanilla beans are at the top of the list. A lot are grown in Madagascar, a place where many people live in poverty. This raises a dilemma: should I be supporting their livelihoods or reducing my water consumption?

You stress the thirstiness of coffee, chocolate, tea and vanilla plants, but they are grown in rainforests or in countries with monsoons providing water from rain rather than irrigation. Growing thirsty plants such as almond trees in deserts is bizarre, but taking advantage of abundant rainfall seems like a good idea.

Felicity Callard at the University of Glasgow, UK, is lead investigator of the rest test ( 2 September, p 32 ).

You say it takes 12,651 litres of water to produce 100 grams of vanilla beans. Clearly that doesn't all end up in the beans. Surely at least some ends up in the atmosphere or in groundwater.

I would like to make a change to cartoonist Tom Gauld's diagram of knowledge. Beyond the "Zone of Utter Ignorance" – in the interests of topicality and with half an eye on the future – should be added the "Event Horizon of Conspiracy Theory" ( 2 September, p 47 ).