Letters: Spiders in the bath
I never find spiders in my bath. My Burmese cat always gets there first.
R. C. Ormiston-Chant Manchester
Letters: Radium in the bin
Recently our department obtained a Q-Ray electro-radioactive dry compress.
This item is a pad measuring 14 inches by 9 inches by 2 inches with electrical
wires throughout. You plug it into the mains, for heating. In addition,
this pad also contains that magic ingredient to cure all aches and pains,
radium.
Historical relics such as these are unearthed every now and then from
cellars and attics. Proper disposal is through the NRPB or Harwell. Each
disposal carries a shipping and handling charge. Who should pay for it?
Being good citizens we took the Q-Ray into our laboratories for contamination
checks and safe storage until correct disposal measures with Harwell were
complete. We did not contemplate that we would be charged 拢350 for
our goodwill gesture of handing over the device, plus all the telephone
calls associated with it.
Our attention was drawn to a recent article in a chemical journal entitled
‘Do-it-yourself radiotherapy – 1930s style’ which involved a local council
finding a Q-Ray in a council house they were clearing. It appears that the
council now has to bear the cost for disposal. Would it have been better
to dispose of it with the daily refuse, as I am sure must have happened
in the past? Likewise, future generations may eventually face the same situation
with respect to the safe disposal of the prolific numbers of smoke detectors
containing americium.
Just how many other ‘do-it-yourself’ devices are scattered throughout
the country? Would a national awareness campaign bring many more items to
our attention? Should there be a radioactive antiques road show?
Paul Love Kent and Canterbury Hospital
Letters: Deaf left out
Julie Clayton’s article (‘Can they do science?’, 5 September) about
the problems faced by disabled people in science is a classical example
of the deaf as the Cinderellas of the disabled. There is not one example
of a deaf scientist, when most deaf people tend to go into science/technical-based
careers due to their limited language development at schools.
Unlike blind people in technical employment, the deaf do relatively
well as they are able to make use of all instruments available (though not
when they start to break down with a noise!). However, with recent technological
advances in speech synthesisers and voice-recognition in both computer
and instrument operation, the future becomes a worrying one for aspiring
deaf technicians and scientists.
I. J. F. Poplett South Croydon, Surrey
Letters: Quack quack
Donald Gould writes, in his review of American Health Quackery (5 September),
that he is amazed at the gullibility of an increasingly educated public.
I studied my ‘quackery’, chiropractic, in America, graduating in 1957.
My daughter, after three good A levels in the sciences, is in the middle
of her five-year course at the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic
in Bournemouth, also studying ‘quackery’.
The Medical Research Council’s investigation, ‘Low back pain of mechanical
origin: randomised comparison of chiropractic and hospital outpatient treatment’,
published in the British Medical Journal, June 1990, came out heavily on
the side of quackery, saying chiropractic treatment was ‘more effective
than hospital outpatient management . . . Introducing chiropractic into
the NHS should be considered’.
Was this an illusion? Or perhaps scientific magic?
Clifford Thompson The Chiropractic Clinic Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
Letters: Tether tale
It appears that Annabel Macleod and John Allsop believe that those who
have been working on space tethers are ignorant of the law of conservation
of energy (Letters, 5 September).
Of course a satellite using a tether to generate electricity would slowly
lose altitude as energy was extracted from its orbital motion. Conversely,
a satellite could raise its orbital altitude by allowing power to flow into
the tether.
If a space shuttle was equipped with a tether to produce the 40 kilowatts
of electricity it consumes during flight, its orbit would drop by about
3 kilometres per day. As the maximum flight duration is around eight days
this would not be important.
A permanently orbiting satellite would use a tether as a store rather
than a source of electricity. Current satellites must carry banks of nickel
cadmium or nickel hydrogen cells. Charged by the solar cells, they provide
power when the satellite is in the Earth’s shadow. A satellite with a tether
could use it to pump up its orbit when in sunlight and then produce electricity
when its orbit takes it into the Earth’s shadow. Effectively, the orbit
is being used as a battery.
Also a tether could be used to make adjustments to the satellite’s orbit
without using its thrusters. This is very useful as the finite supply of
thruster fuel is usually what limits a satellite’s lifetime.
Michael Morton Taunton, Somerset
Letters: Unsociable stars
Readers fearing for the lives of their distant offspring after reading
J. Whitman’s prediction of the arrival of the star Lalande 21185 in our
midsts (Letters, 19 September) can sleep easy. In addition to its newly
determined velocity of 86 kilometres per second along our line of sight,
the star has an orthogonal component of velocity, known as its proper motion,
of about 57 km/s. Given the star’s current distance of 8 light years, this
means that Lalande 21185 will miss us by the comfortable margin of about
4.5 years.
Current observations of the nearby stars indicate that the dim little
star Ross 248 is destined to become our closest companion in the foreseeable
future, with a close approach distance of a trifling 2.97 light years about
36 000 years from now. This is 30 per cent closer than our current closest
companion, Proxima Centauri.
Indeed, we appear to be living at a time when our stellar companions
are acting somewhat unsociably: 34 000 years from now there will be no fewer
than five stars all closer to us than Proxima Centauri is now.
Robert Matthews Sunday Telegraph, London
Letters: Chemical cockups
Recent chemistry in New 杏吧原创 needs correction.
Calcium oxalate does not decompose to give oxygen (‘Trees to fuel Africa’s
fires’, 29 August). The decomposition first produces carbon monoxide and,
at a higher temperature, carbon dioxide.
Various catalysts are described as containing hydrated hydroxides (Science,
5 September), but below the catalyst’s operating temperature such phases
will have decomposed.
Caerin 1.1 (Science, 5 September) should be described as having a molecular
mass of 2582 daltons and not units.
Ian Ferguson Preston, Lancashire
Letters: Homes for turtles
I refer to ‘Return to Turtle Bay’ (This Week, 29 August). In addition
to preservation of the existing loggerhead turtle nesting sites, surely
the establishment of new ones has been considered. Throughout the Greek
islands, there are dozens of deserted, inaccessible beaches where eggs could
be buried, or newly hatched turtles released. Has this been tried? If not,
why not?
Also, the book review by Mike Holderness (5 September) cites four technological
‘heroic failures’. Unfortunately, one is the R-100, which is the airship
which didn’t crash. The other is the TSR-2. Had this not been cancelled
by a misguided government, it would still be in service today. The subsequent
Tornado programme would have been unnecessary and the RAF would have had
a better aircraft.
F. G. Grisley Barry, Glamorgan
Letters: Trickle tyres
Your issue of 29 August mentioned a new process whereby used tyres are
to be pyrolised to produce oil and other materials (Technology).
Very worthy, no doubt, but a used tyre would seem to me to be a useful
object in itself. A tyre is resistant to degradation and the shape is similar
to a Rosehig ring – a random pile of tyres would contain a large volume
of voids. Water trickling through such a pile would efficiently contact
air in the voids.
Oxidation ponds at sewage works could be replaced by trickle towers
filled with old tyres. The inner rim of the tyres would retain sufficient
active sludge to metabolise any organic matter in the water passing through,
which would then go to settling ponds. The land area required for a rubber
sewage works would be much less than for the conventional works and capital
costs much lower.
R. E. Durrant Watford, Hertfordshire
Letters: Coffin air
What are we to make of the report that a cool $500 000 is to be spent
in Maryland on obtaining genuine 17th-century American air from the inside
of – wait for it – an occupied lead coffin (This Week, 29 August)?
I don’t know about you, Dear Editor, but given a choice between a lungful
of Los Angeles photochemical smog and the air surrounding a 300-year-old
cadaver, I would unhesitatingly plump for the former, no matter how ‘perfectly
preserved’ the coffin’s occupant.
Seriously, what can this hugely expensive experiment, with its elaborate
precautions against contamination with modern air, hope to tell its collaborators
about the air in colonial America? They say they are interested in greenhouse
gases, but the article gives few clues to their thinking. For example, carbon
dioxide is not mentioned at all. Presumably the collaborators don’t need
me to tell them that even limited aerobic or anaerobic putrefaction would
vastly increase the amount of this gas over and above its natural levels.
Also, while we normally think of lead as a fairly unreactive metal,
it is common knowledge that it does react slowly with constituents of the
atmosphere to form a surface coating of hydroxides and carbonates. This
is another factor that must alter the composition of moist, trapped air,
even without the complication of a cadaver.
Colin Berry Chesham, Buckinghamshire
Letters: First fleas?
The cat-flea story is at least six years older than Feedback suggests
(29 August).
I have a copy of an article by Tim Robinson from the New 杏吧原创 of
17 June 1976, whose summary reads: ‘A warm summer and increasingly cosy
homes are encouraging a population boom in cat fleas – a development more
harmful to humans than cats.’
Perhaps you could offer a small prize for the earliest recorded appearance
of this hardy perennial.
D. W. Budworth London
Letters: Spiders in the bath
Spiders get in the bath through the overflow pipe, which often connects
the bath directly to the outside world, unlike basin and sink overflows
which discharge into the waste pipe just below the plug hole. I had to
remove dozens of them each summer until I worked out how they got in and
put mesh over the outer end of the pipe.
C. J. Arnold Colchester, Essex
Letters: Spiders in the bath
Most domiciles contain a few large black spiders only seen when a piece
of heavy furniture is moved. They usually remain hidden in a dark corner
till night when they begin to forage around the house for insects. Then,
if one is burning the midnight oil, they are often to be seen dashing from
one site to another. Eventually, during their foraging, they climb up walls,
along the cornices of the ceilings, up the curtains and because climbing
up such surfaces is presumably difficult, they sometimes fall. If they
happen to fall into a bath, this acts as a trap and they often cannot
climb out.
Norman Burrell Wareham, Dorset
Letters: Spiders in the bath
Imagine that there is a parallel universe, one of many, in which the
spiders are physicists and baths do not exist. These spiders have discovered
a way in which to transform small areas of space time and tag a ride on
a superstring. This gives them the ability to transcend the reality barrier
and cross over into our version of normality.
What they have managed to do is far beyond our current capabilities
and it is unfortunate that they have little knowledge of the behaviour of
nine-dimensional superstrings to which small parts of three-dimensional
space have been fused. They are after all only allowed a small research
budget.
The object that we choose to call a bath in Einstein/Hawking space
is in reality a strange attractor that, because of its shape, focuses disturbances
in the space-time continuum in such a way that these hybrid strings appear
in mid-air some 50 centimetres above the rim; somewhere towards the head
end. This focusing is a near instantaneous event, which due to its thermodynamic
instability causes the space-time-superstring fusion to become severed.
The spider materialises and falls into the bottom of the bath.
Simon Ingate Southampton
Letters: Spiders in the bath
I was enjoying a relaxing hot bath (Letters, 12 September). It had been
a long hard day at the office but now I was at peace with the world. Then,
something at the far end of the bath caught my attention. Through the misty
atmosphere my eyes gradually focused on two – what were they? – two rusty
wires protruding from two of the six holes of the overflow pipe. But why
were they waving about? After a few moments one of them disappeared. The
another one appeared alongside the remaining one in the same hole. They
continued to wave about and now bend in a curious way. My eyes opened wide.
The black hole suddenly seemed to swell in size – and then with a squeeze
and a heave a big black spider hopped into my bath – and I promptly hopped
out.
Richard James Cambridge