Ha ha
Your recent article on the obviousness of the findings of the University of Central Lancashire, as presented at the annual British Psychological Society conference in Brighton, seems to reaffirm the general standing which psychology has in the scientific community (Feedback, 4 May).
Your review seemed to take the stance that “well, it’s obvious, innit? Waste of scientific resources”. Perhaps you have forgotten that common sense and untested belief are not in fact the backbone of science鈥攅mpirical data are.
The application of science in psychology is at least as rigorous, if not more so, than in the so-called “hard sciences”. Perhaps the “we’ll just say it was 5 millilitres” of chemistry, or the “must have been dodgy apparatus” of physics rings a bell.
Not wishing to sound like another grumpy psychologist, I just want to point out that your sarcasm is misplaced and would perhaps be better directed towards the inherent xenophobia of science as a whole. It would be interesting to see you report the more positive aspects of the BPS conference if that wouldn’t compromise your readership too much.
To end on a positive note, perhaps psychologists take themselves too seriously so, ha ha, your article was very funny.
Midge menace
I feel obliged to respond to Matt Gavin regarding the lack of sound at Lake Myvatn in Iceland (Letters, 11 May, p 52).
My wife and I camped there in the late 1980s and my memory of the lake is still vivid. Myvatn is Icelandic for midges and I can assure readers that there was not a lot of silence the day we were there. Maybe Matt should have his hearing selectively tested for the frequency band of the Icelandic midge.
Feminist nerds
Who are these feminists who have purportedly turned their backs on computer culture (“Life at the interface”, 27 April, p 40)? Certainly not Australian feminists. Women’s Electoral Lobby can be found at .
Fatal fires
The phenomenon of a large fireball coming out of a compartment when a door is opened, due to the inrush of oxygen igniting unburnt pyrolysis products, is termed “backdraught” rather than “flashover” (In Brief, 27 April, p 13).
Flashover, the rapid transition of a growing fire to a fully developed fire, occurs within the compartment when pyrolysis products in the smoke layer burn and radiate downwards causing any flammable objects in the room to catch fire.
Backdraught occurs when unburnt pyrolysis products collect in the smoke layer, at above their ignition temperature, but do not burn due to a lack of oxygen. When there is a sudden inrush of air, as happens when a firefighter opens a door, pyrolysis products throughout the compartment rapidly burn. This creates the fireball that your article describes.
Hidden emission
No doubt the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s electrolytic iron smelter emits no carbon dioxide (Technology, 11 May, p 23). However, your report ignores the CO2 produced in generating the electricity needed for electrolysis (Technology, 11 May, p 23). Or does the vigorous process somehow generate its own electricity?
After the fall
Some 18 months ago I was unwise enough to slide off a roof while fixing a TV aerial. I fell 30 feet, landing flat on my back in the garden and leaving a noticeable crater (I’m 18 stone). I broke my collarbone and practically all my ribs, and comprehensively shattered my right wrist. Luckily, I was promptly attended to by paramedics and rushed to hospital, where my survival was in doubt for a week or so.
I spent some four weeks in what my wife (a nurse and midwife) refers to as the Intensive Scare Unit, where I had to be anaesthetised for a week or so because of uncontrollable pain. Then, after progressing through all the non-morphine painkillers available (Voltarol, and so on), none of which worked in the slightest (a period I would prefer to forget), I was rescued by a beneficent anaesthetic consultant who prescribed morphine (“Give a drug a bad name”, 6 April, p 14, and Letters, 27 April, p 54). This immediately made life bearable and I progressed rapidly.
When I transferred to an ordinary ward, an immediate battle broke out between myself and my wife on the one hand, and the junior doctors and ward sister on the other.
They expressed universal horror at my being on morphine (“We’ve got much better and safer things than that”). When asked by my wife to list them, they went through all the drugs that I had tried in intensive care.
Eventually, exasperated by this difficult patient and wife, the ward sister said: “Well, I’m not happy at his being on morphine at all. I think I’ll call in Mr X, the pain consultant.” We then gleefully informed her that it was Mr X who had put me on morphine in the first place. She glowered at us and disappeared, never to be seen again.
The ordinary nursing staff’s attitude was interesting. I was aware of being rather disapproved of for needing morphine鈥攁s if I was a rather degenerate type, lacking in willpower, like an alcoholic or child molester
When the consultant, Mr X, came back to prescribe oral morphine (instead of the injections I had been on), he set the dose at 140 milligrams, several times a day. I was to be on this regime for 3 or 4 days before discharge, to try it out.
Later that day, the junior doctor (a German鈥攕ee your article for attitudes to morphine in Germany) reduced it to 80 milligrams, thinking 140 milligrams excessive. The resulting agony I experienced caused the consultant to be recalled, and he was less than happy with the houseman for altering his prescription.
When I got home, my GP and I agreed on a progressive dose reduction of 10 milligrams every 3 or 4 days. This was entirely without side effects. No withdrawal effects occurred in the 7 or 8 weeks it took to reduce the dose to zero.
Finally, I concur with J. Pryce’s letter (18 May, p 57). Bearing in mind the medical trade’s general attitude to pain, if ever there is the prospect of my being admitted to hospital with some terminal condition, such as cancer, I will purchase a small cylinder of nitrogen and sit at home and inhale the lot. I would never again willingly put myself at their mercy.
Tomorrow's coal
Fred Pearce suggests that the vegetation inundated by artificial lakes created for hydroelectric power projects will almost all decay into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane (“Trouble bubbles for hydropower”, 4 May, p 28). Referring to the Balbina Dam in the Amazon catchment, the author writes: “鈥o the reservoir was allowed to inundate more than 100 million tonnes of vegetation. As it decays most of the carbon it contains will eventually be released into the air.”
This is incorrect. I have been researching the origin of bicarbonate in the waters of the Great Artesian Basin of Australia. It comes from carbon dioxide from vegetation decaying under oxidising conditions, which ends up in the groundwater as carbonate or bicarbonate, or is deposited as calcium carbonate in the lake sediments. In fact, most decaying vegetation in artificial lakes would be buried under anaerobic conditions with river muds and would form peat and ultimately coal as any geologist would tell you.
Amazing maize
It is good to see attempts to harness modern biotechnology to the needs of small farmers in the developing world, but your report was overoptimistic (Technology, 11 May, p 20).
Despite the ravages caused by witchweed, local maize varieties are effective in much of Africa because they are locally adapted, variable, outcrossing populations, changing in composition as they adapt to local problems. They are quite different from the pure-line F1 hybrids of the developed world, which need fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides to produce consistently high yields.
So, can this particular kind of genetic transformation from the developed world be harnessed to the needs of the African small farmer? The new gene construct cannot be introduced into the local maize populations鈥攊t would be impossible to transform genetically all of the many local lines鈥攚hich change from year to year as they hybridise at random.
Equally, it would not be sensible or feasible to produce a single, herbicide-resistant F1 hybrid for all local farmers to grow鈥攖he hybrid would be quickly destroyed by local pests or pathogens. Moreover, its use in this way could lead to the selection of witchweed plants resistant to the herbicide.
A possible compromise might be to mix the treated seeds of “engineered” lines with seed from local populations, to reduce the witchweed infestation while retaining the advantages of the local maize populations. The proportion of transformed seed could be varied depending on the intensity of infestation in an area. This might also help to delay the development of witchweed plants resistant to the herbicide.
Trap-happy
Mark Glover gives a one-sided and shallow interpretation of the debate on the European Union’s ban on the leghold trap (Letters, 4 May, p 54). The fact that the European Commission has decided to postpone and amend Regulation 3254/91 demonstrates not only greater recognition by the EU of its international trade obligations, but also illustrates the complexities of the trapping issue.
If the EU’s objective is to promote animal welfare, this will not be achieved by banning one type of trap while allowing others, which are possibly even less humane, to remain in use. There are many traps available for sale on the European market, including limb-holding devices similar to the leghold trap, but the EU has not been able to provide any scientific evidence to show that these devices are more humane, more selective and hence more acceptable.
The present trap research programme in North America is the most extensive of its kind anywhere in the world and has resulted in the development of more humane trapping systems for a number of species. In contrast, the EU has no collective research programme and no comprehensive system for evaluating traps used by member states.
In condemning drowning as an inhumane method of killing, Glover does not mention that this is a very common method of destroying semi-aquatic species such as muskrat in other EU countries (over 1 million of these animals are trapped each year in the EU for pest control). Before condemning North America, is he not aware of practices closer to home?
What Glover clearly overlooks is that trapping is permitted in virtually every country in the world, including EU countries, for a variety of reasons. Less than 10 per cent of trapping worldwide is actually undertaken for fur and yet that is Glover’s only focus. Isn’t it time that the welfare of animals trapped for purposes other than fur was also considered?
International standards based on science, to cover all trapping, are long overdue. We believe that this is what the European Commission is now trying to achieve.
Spikes for speed
The article entitled “Star Wars Express” (6 April, p 32) stated that one of the factors preventing trains travelling at speeds exceeding 500 kilometres per hour was air friction. However, “Rider on the Shock Wave” (17 February, p 28) seems to describe the appropriate technology to overcome this. After all, what is exceeding 500 kilometres per hour compared to the speeds of Mach 25 described in this article?
As I am a microbiologist, and therefore not involved in the fields described, perhaps I’ve missed something. Is the idea of putting an air spike on the front of a high-speed train feasible? If so, someone ought to get the two project coordinators in touch with one another and really give the air industry a run for its money.
The wrong trees
Having recently spent a couple of years in the forest-savanna mosaic belt of western Uganda, I was interested to read Melissa Leach and James Fairhead’s views in Kate de Selincourt’s article “Demon farmers and other myths” (Features, 27 April, p 36). In Uganda, too, the forest-savanna boundary is very “woolly” and is probably in a constant state of flux. I suspect that Leach and Fairhead would find support for their West African findings there.
However, I feel the article did not do justice to the conservationists’ viewpoint. Admittedly, conservation means different things to different people, but I imagine that most of the people quoted would consider themselves to be nature conservationists rather than tree conservationists. I think we need to be clear that a landscape with plenty of trees doesn’t necessarily correspond to one valued by nature conservationists, rendering some of the article’s assertions irrelevant.
To take the example of western Kenya quoted in the article, although there has been an increase in tree cover as rural human populations have increased, this has been largely of exotic tree species in an agricultural landscape, which can in no way compensate for the human-induced loss of natural forest that undoubtedly occurred in this same area in the not-too-distant past.
Likewise, in West Africa, nature conservationists are particularly concerned to ensure the long-term survival of the few remaining large forest fragments rather than the forest-savanna-agriculture mosaic that has come to dominate this region. These larger fragments are now isolated, either for climatic reasons, or because the surrounding land has been put to other uses (including small-scale cultivation by expanding rural populations).
In the longer term, larger forest fragments can support many more species than small patches of woodland or forest around villages, partly because of their size, and partly because they are subjected to less human pressure (hunting, firewood collection and so on). This is not to say that mosaics have no nature conservation value, but I suspect that the statistics relating to forest cover quoted by conservationists rightly record the progressive shrinking and isolation of these larger fragments and discount the spread of forest-savanna-agriculture mosaics.
It is right to draw attention to the fact that nature conservationists (and policy makers generally) haven’t always taken the human dimension of conservation sufficiently into account, but we should avoid turning this into a general attack on the whole conservation ethos.
Naturally deadly
Stuart Neilson’s work on the dangers of natural radiation merits attention (This Week, 4 May, p 4). However, geographically based surveys have their limits. Research is needed on dose rates and subsequent health profiles. Studies up to now have been based on radon concentrations, not the dose actually received. Given the adverse impact on health now ascribed to “natural background radiation”, a longitudinal study examining the health of families over generations could yield some interesting findings.
Work on alpha particle irradiation by Wright and colleagues at the Medical Research Council indicates that it may be 3 to 150 times as dangerous as was previously thought. Rather than leading to an excess of a particular cancer, alpha particles might be giving rise to small increases in a variety of adverse effects.
Bumping junk
I would like to make three points about satellites colliding with objects in space (“Junk that goes bump”, 11 May, p 25).
The energy of an object in orbit is the sum of its kinetic and potential energies. Drag causes a loss of energy such that objects decay into a lower and faster orbit.
The physical model in the author’s mind of hypervelocity impact must be wrong, as the contacting surfaces will be moving faster than the stress waves moving at the speed of sound in the solid. Thus it is not “punching” but melting or vaporising a hole.
Although the number of meteorites in 1999 may appear to be high, so is the volume of space in which the satellites fly.