Letters: Son of the Sun
The interest of John Paul II in reconciling the Catholic Church to the
views of Galileo and Copernicus on the Solar System (Forum, 13 November)
could well be based on his perception of his destiny. I visited Cracow before
he became Pope and in the eyes of its citizens, it was most famous as the
home of Copernicus. Karol Wojtyla was a university student there before
becoming Professor of Moral Theology, Bishop, Archbishop and Metropolitan
of Cracow and finally Cardinal in 1967.
According to the prophecies about the Popes attributed to St Malachy,
he is ‘De Labore Solis’ (from the toil of the sun) which is fitting for
a Pope from the city where the heliocentric system was worked out. These
prophecies are well known in Rome, and according to Peter Bander, author
of The Prophecies of St Malachy and St Columbkille, a rumour circulated
there at the time of the election of John XXIII that Cardinal Spellman had
hired a boat, filled it with sheep, and sailed it up and down the Tiber
to fulfill the prophecy for the next Pope, ‘Pastor et Nauta’.
The list of latin tags is of course finite, consisting of descriptions
of 108 Popes from 1143 onwards. That for the next Pope is ‘Gloria Olivae’.
Then follows the last Pope in the list, ‘Petrus Romanus’, in whose reign
Rome is destroyed.
John D. Renton Garsington, Oxford
Letters: Techno style
Has anyone ever tried to miniaturise the Crooke’s Radiometer?
If any manufacturer can get it down to less than two inches in diameter,
I know one very modern young miss who is quite scatty enough to wear them
as earrings.
John Rudge Harlington, Middlesex
Letters: Attractive coin
The comment in Feedback (2 October) and subsequent correspondence (Letters,
23 October and 13 November) about the 1p coin coincided with a rather startling
discovery. I had slipped a magnet in my jacket pocket for later use and
on removing the magnet I was more than a little surprised to find a 1p coin
stuck to it.
It was a bright and shiny new coin and my first reaction was that it
must be a forgery, but that hardly seemed worthwhile. Upon testing a selection
of coins with the magnet, I found that apparently any ‘copper’ dated 1992
or 1993 was strongly attracted to the magnet. Further testing showed these
coins to have approximately the same mass as their predecessors but a very
different composition. There is chemical evidence of a considerable iron
content in the coins and I have reason to believe that they consist of an
iron or steel disc which has been copper coated.
I have not seen or heard any announcement that our coins were to be
debased in this way. What next? Metallised plastic?
John Bexon Canterbury, Christ Church College
Letters: Bonfire bomb
Like many country dwellers I occasionally find it expedient to dispose
of intractable woody wastes in a bonfire. At a late stage when the flames
have died down one is normally left with a patch of white wood ash a few
centimetres deep. If this ash layer is still hot after nightfall, and is
disturbed, the exposed charcoal will burn with a dull red glow (400degreeC
approx). Naturally the smallest embers burn away soonest, but the remarkable
thing is that just before these small embers are finally consumed there
is a major change in their surface temperature. Quite suddenly a small
glowing fragment flares up to a brilliant incandescence, corresponding to
possible 1500degreeC or so, and then goes out in a fraction of a second.
When observed in the dark the microscopic super-novae can be fascinating.
The phenomenon occurs randomly and is independent of the proximity of other
glowing embers, large or small.
Can anyone advance a plausible explanation for this rapid increase in
temperature in the final few seconds of the combustion of the last milligrams
of charcoal?
Reginald Titt Salisbury, Wiltshire
* * *
Correction: our report on the South American Hidrovia project (This
Week, 23 October) indicated that a report on the project was prepared by
the US Environmental Defense Fund when, in fact, Wetlands for the Americas
prepared that report.
Letters: Female fellows
In my Review of Women Physiologists (27 November), which celebrates
the 75th anniversary of the Physiological Society, some editorial ellipsis
gave the female membership of the Royal Society as 11 per cent. This, however,
is the figure for the Physiological Society. Following the principle ‘the
higher the fewer’, the proportion of women Fellows of the Royal Society
is only 3 per cent.
Remarkably, the proportion of women Fellows of the Royal Society has
hovered around the 3 per cent mark for the last 25 years. Figures of 2 to
3 per cent are par for the course, in the world’s academies of science,
except for those which are making some effort to locate and elect qualified
women. The Academy of Science (Academy III) of the Royal Society of Canada
is now 4.2 per cent women, a result of its five-year Plan for the Advancement
of Women in Scholarship, which began in 1989. In the last five years,
10.7 per cent of the Academy’s new members have been women.
Best is the US National Academy of Science, in which the proportion
of women has risen steadily since 1970 to its present figure of 4.7 per
cent. In the last five years, women made up 8.7 per cent of new members
elected.
The Royal Society has elected 7 women out of 200 new Fellows (3.5 per
cent) in the last five years. At this rate it may not reach 10 per cent
for a century or so. A polite term for this problem is institutional inertia.
Joan Mason Cambridge
Letters: Nuclear future
I am prompted to put pen to paper having read the excellent article
‘Nuclear power on Britain’s back burner’ by Michael Cross (6 November).
This cuts across dogma and gives a very good unbiased view of Britain’s
current attitudes and, to some extent, the technical development of nuclear
power.
Although I was a member of the first AGR design team at UKAEA Risley
in the l950s, I hope I have retained a balanced view of the pros and cons
of nuclear power – not the ‘rose coloured spectacles’ view of the early
days.
I have just returned from a business visit to Hong Kong and Beijing
and I support wholeheartedly Cross’s view that South Asia is a vast potential
market. Having invested hundreds of millions of pounds of public money,
it would be stupidly suicidal of the government to lose this last chance
of reaping some reward. They must put aside political short-termism and
give the immediate go ahead to the building of Sizewell C so as to give
Nuclear Electric a chance at least to submit tenders on a worldwide basis.
I do not believe that any sane, thinking member of the public begrudges
a few more per cent of their salary as income tax being spent on nuclear
power for the future’s sake, not to mention our infrastructure.
Michael G. Bennett Sheffield
* * *
This correspondence is now closed – Ed
Letters: Rossing reality
C. A. Algar (Letters, 30 October) reckons his account of the International
Atomic Energy Agency mission to Rossing Uranium gives ‘a substantially different
impression’ of the mine from Roger Milne’s original New 杏吧原创 article
(This Week, 18 April 1992). But his upbeat presentation ignores three important
points.
The Rossing Manager for Corporate Affairs omits one IAEA general conclusion,
that ‘Grievances exist about some cases of illnesses, including lung cancer,
which are thought to be related to occupational radiation exposure. However,
such cases can only be addressed in comparison to national vital statistics,
which do not seem to exist in Namibia at the present time.’ Despite the
debatable assertion that national vital statistics are a prerequisite for
any study, at least the IAEA mentions cancer; Algar does not.
Many of the IAEA general conclusions are contradicted by their own 231-page
report. For example, the IAEA states: ‘Radiation exposure levels at various
facilities are very low, much lower than the current international limits
. . .’ But their expert found a radon working level of 0.94 (over twice
the International Commission on Radiological Protection limit of 0.4 WL)
at the ‘No. 4 Reclaim Tunnel’ and suggested the company install a fan. The
IAEA found ‘reliable records for some portions of the dose from all sources
are only available from 1980-81 onwards’ and discovered increasingly acidic
liquid seepage from the radioactive tailings dump but omitted these (and
other) findings from their general conclusions.
The IAEA ignored requests from the Mineworkers Union of Namibia to interview
individual cases. They passed over the union’s plea to obtain the internal
documents analysed in Past Exposure, including the December 1982 Rossing
Radiation Report by the company’s Chief Environmentalist (see Letters, 23
May 1992). The IAEA said they were given access to every document they requested.
So perhaps they did not ask for the 1982 Radiation Report which states the
company was not monitoring whole body dose and had an inappropriate limit
for control of airborne uranium dust in 1982
These points are developed in the current issue of the journal Raw Materials
Report (PO Box 90103, S-120 21 Stockholm, Sweden).
Greg Dropkin Liverpool
Letters: Rossing reality
I was asked by the Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) and Partizans
(People Against RTZ and its subsidiaries) to review the non-radiation hazards
discussed in the UN Report on Rossing released in May this year.
The UN report revealed many non-radiation areas of concern; chemical
and dust hazards, noise exposure, inadequate and badly maintained ventilation
systems, poor safety systems (for example, for the wearing of respiratory
equipment), back injuries, a lack of proper medical examinations and ineffective
safety committees. There is no system to follow-up employees who may suffer
from illness some time after leaving the plant: the workforce was once 3300
and is now around 1300. There appeared to be no systematic plan for the
decommissioning of the plant.
Rossing is in need of: (1) a truly independent health, safety and environment
audit, (2) an independent trade union: whose members are trained to recognise
and control the hazards (this was a crucial recommendation of the UN report),
(3) regular workplace inspections and clinical current and ex-employee follow-up
by Namibia’s Labour and Health Inspectorate (or the UN or the WHO).
Without these safeguards I fear that the health of the many miners who
have worked at this mine, and possibly the surrounding community, will have
been damaged.
A. J. P. Dalton South Bank University London
Letters: Peaceful people
Susan Katz Miller’s article ‘How ecstasy blows your mind’ (This Week,
20 November) reports on the results of American research that, she says
‘may be evidence of the ‘neurotoxic potential’ of the drug’.
She then goes on to report that, ‘in personality tests, the team found
that the group who took ecstasy were less impulsive and hostile, and showed
greater constraint and control’. However, she doubts that these characteristics
were caused by their use of ecstasy, quoting an American psychiatrist’s
view that ‘people who gravitate to this drug are often less hostile’.
However, there is evidence to indicate that ecstasy modifies user’s
behaviour in this way. An ethnographic survey by Mark Gilman, a researcher
for the Manchester drug agency Lifeline studying a group of football supporters,
showed that when they switched from alcohol to ecstasy they gave up fighting.
Simultaneously, statistics confirmed that the number of fans arrested and
ejected from grounds fell to their lowest level for five years.
An interesting aspect of the American research not mentioned in your
article is that peaceful behaviour was associated with lowered serotonin
levels, contrary to general belief. This supports the findings mentioned
in your article ‘Does the ‘aggressive gene’ lurk in a Dutch family?’ (This
Week, 30 October) which links aggressive behaviour with high levels of serotonin.
When the WHO expert committee recommended that member countries of the
Convention on Psychotropic Substances outlaw MDMA (ecstasy) in 1985, they
were sufficiently impressed by anecdotal evidence of its potential benefits
to issue a directive urging member countries ‘to facilitate research on
this interesting substance’ under the provisions of Article 7.
As Britain is a world leader in ecstasy consumption per capita, isn’t
it time that some serious research was carried out in this country?
Nicholas Saunders London
Letters: Desire for ivory
I noted with concern the errors in Colin Tudge’s book review article,
‘And the elephants died out one by one’ (6 November).
Primarily, it is important to correct the typographical error which
gave the number of African elephants on the continent as ‘less than 60 000’
instead of 600 000.
Secondly, Tudge states that ‘the ivory market has now crashed’. Although
the level of illegal hunting for ivory has reportedly declined in several
countries since the international ban on ivory trade came into effect, there
still appears to be a market and this may well be on the increase.
This fact is borne out by numerous documented reports of illegal killing
of elephants and arrests of ivory traffickers all over the continent, since
the ban was implemented. It is important to realise too, that in some countries
local ivory markets are still legal and flourishing. Human desire for ivory
did not die with the ban.
It is also misleading to claim that only the elephants ‘in the forests
in the heart of Africa . . . seem free from interference’. In the central
African forests there has been and still is considerable pressure on forest
elephant populations from humans, who hunt them for both meat and ivory.
There is also a growing demand for conservationists to find equitable solutions
for the conflicts between elephants and the humans with whom they share
the land.
Holly T. Dublin IUCN/SSC/African Elephant Specialist Group Nairobi,
Kenya
Letters: Double vortex
Ken Croswell, in ‘Are we living next door to a cannibal?’ (New 杏吧原创,
Science, 24 July) reported on the discovery by Tod Lauer and his colleagues
that Andromeda, our next-door galaxy, might have two nuclei. One of the
ideas put forth to explain the phenomenon suggests that the second nucleus
might be ‘the remnant of another galaxy that recently collided with Andromeda’.
Yet, is an alternate explanation for the existence of two nuclei plausible?
Often, the liquid vortex, like the one produced in a stirred cup of
coffee, has been used as an analog to the ultimate galactic whirlpool. If
one accepts the latter, then there is at least one laboratory example in
the study of liquid vortex motion where, under prevailing conditions, a
single vortex can split into two unequal strength vortices circling each
other about the centre of rotation (see Journal of Fluid Mechanics vol 217,
p 241). The latter may be attributed to the existence of waves produced
in the vortex core. In nature, tornadoes with multiple trunks have also
been observed. Then the following question comes to mind: are we then really
living next to a cannibal, or are we living next to an agitated friend?
Georgios Vatistas Concordia University Montreal, Canada
Letters: Quantum secrets
‘Stronger than Atoms’ by David Burgess and Henry Hutchinson (20 November)
was a fascinating read. However I would be less sanguine about the possibility
of future high-energy particle physics experiments being done with a compact
accelerator only a ‘few metres’ in length based on the plasma ‘beat-wave’
effect.
Nature uses quantum mechanics to guard her innermost secrets. As the
energy of the collisions in an electron-position collider like LEP is increased,
the likelihood of these point-like particles interacting falls rapidly,
like one over the square of the energy.
When in a few years’ time LEP reaches its top energy of nearly 100 000
million electron-volts per beam, the number of electron-positron annihilations
to a pair of charged W-bosons will only be a few thousand a year – just
enough for worthwhile experiments. A machine of the same beam brightness,
or luminosity, but operating at ten times this energy, would deliver only
a few tens of interesting events a year.
To beat this collapse of yield as energy rises will require dense bunches
of the electrons and positrons to be focused into spots only nanometers
in size as they collide. This puts extreme limits on the particle sources
and on the acceleration process. Although the plasma beat-wave may provide
very rapid acceleration, the relatively high plasma density and the very
strong fields generated are likely to corrupt the high beam quality essential
to attain the necessary luminosity.
The experiments described by Burgess and Hutchinson investigate extreme
situations in the interaction of light and matter and are excellent examples
of truly basic science which should not need to be justified by identifying
potential applications, although there are sure to be many.
John Mulvey Abingdon, Oxfordshire
Letters: Beating bleach
The curious reappearance of the original yellow colour to P. F. Larrington’s
cotton trousers after bleaching (Letters, 27 November) can be explained
by the differences in the molecular structures of the two dye types involved.
The majority of dyestuffs for textiles belong to the azo group, which
are cheap to produce and give good colour value but suffer the disadvantage
of being easily destroyed by bleach. Cotton, however, can be dyed with more
expensive vat dyes that form an insoluble, highly substantive pigment within
the fibre structure. The vat dye, usually an anthraquinonoid, has a high
resistance to bleaching.
Hence, the offending green dye from the tracksuit would be destroyed
by the solution of thick bleach, but the more robust vat dye remains intact
rendering the trousers their original pale yellow colour.
John Hogget Society of Dyers and Colourists London
Letters: Bills and bulbs
The letter from G. C. Thompson on the reduction in mains voltage (27
November) should not go unchallenged.
In the case of heating appliances, it is true, of course, that they
will take longer to reach operating temperature, and it is also true that
the power (‘rate of using energy’) will fall, though this will not ‘decrease
our electricity bills’ since the extra time taken will exactly compensate
for the reduced power, and the effect on the electricity bill is to keep
it the same.
In the case of the light bulbs, Thompson will find that bulbs he buys
after the change will increasingly be rated for 230 volts, which will restore
the brightness to its customary level. However, he must expect to wait up
to 30 per cent longer before changing them, because reducing the supply
voltage considerably extends bulb life.
Chris Finn Beverley, East Yorkshire