Letters : . . .
Sandy Bay, Tasmania
Farmers have been giving animals low doses of antibiotics for over 50 years
because they promote the efficient use of food, apparently by keeping the
animals healthy. In addition, according to your article, a number of low-dose
antibiotics improve the ability of human and animal white blood cells to
recognise and destroy bacteria.
Since, due to our inability or unwillingness to provide adequate nutrition
and medical care, a good percentage of the world’s millions of humans spend
their days half-starved and half-sick, surely they should be receiving this
inexpensive and beneficial treatment?
Letters : Correction
The article “Seeing with gravity” (14 September, 1996) contained
a number of errors in its discussion of the superconducting gravity gradiometer
(SGG) designed by Ho Jung Paik, professor of physics at the University of
Maryland.
First, Paik developed the SGG in the mid-1970s and not the early 1980s as
stated in the article. Secondly, the two superconducting proof masses in Paik’s
machine are connected by a superconducting circuit. The machine measures the
difference in displacement of the two masses, and the superconducting circuit
reduces the dynamic range over which the machine must operate. The masses do not
act independently as the article says.
The article also stated that Paik’s device needs constant recalibration. This
is not the case. Indeed, once calibrated it remains stable for months and can
detect displacements of some 10-15 metres. Vibration of the device does
not make precise measurement of position difficult for the device, as the
article says.
Letters : . . .
Cambridge
Hell is other people (Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos).
Letters : Station in Hell
Doha, Qatar
Further to your search for hell (Letters, 30 November, p 55 and 25 January, p
51), the small town Hell, some miles east of Trondheim, Norway, used to have a
railway station with a sign on the wall: “Gods Expedition” (“Cargo
delivery” in old-fashioned Norwegian).
Letters : . . .
Leeds
Of all the problems thrown up by the information technology people, I’m not
sure that the omission of the pound sign from the original ASCII set isn’t more
of a problem than a possible failure to deal with the year 2000鈥攂ut it
will, of course, be solved at a stroke by the introduction of the Euro currency
symbol.
Or not. Do you have a Greek “E” on your keyboard or printer?
Letters : Tomorrow's date
Godalming, Surrey
Today is actually 4 February 1997, but my PC is convinced that we’re in the
year 2000 because I’ve reset its CMOS system clock to three years in the future
and have experienced no problems other than with my pop-up appointments
diary.
Users should experience few problems with the date from 1 January 2000,
provided they reset their CMOS system clock manually that day by ignoring the
instruction that requires them to enter the last two digits of the year and
instead enter all four digits: “2000” instead of “00”. The system clock is
usually accessed by holding down the delete key on boot-up.
It’s the same story for temporary date changes in DOS or Windows sessions.
Typing “date” at the DOS prompt results in DOS inviting the user to change the
date using the format “mm-dd-yy” or “dd-mm-yy”. Ignoring the two-digit year
instruction and entering “2000” results in the PC being correctly configured.
Directory date-stamping of files is handled correctly and no problems were
encountered with any of my Windows and Windows 95 applications. The tests were
carried out on three machines.
I’m now going to experiment with the year 3000. I believe in being
prepared.
Letters : Snail's place
Canberra
Will you please explain why the common garden snail, Helix aspersa
(now an introduced garden pest in Australia) makes broad intermittent scrape
marks with its radula when browsing on the outside cover of New
杏吧原创?
The surface pigment is scraped away in patches that are broader than the
radula of the snail, but not in continuous trails. Also, the selection of place
does not depend on the colour, so it seems unlikely that the snails are in
search of trace elements for their diet. Clearly, also, we can’t use this
behaviour as a test of colour vision.
The famous Australian artist Stephen Holland, who has won the 1997 Gordon
Samstag scholarship to work at the Slade School of Art in London, keeps a colony
of Helix aspersa which browse as they please on various magazine covers
to create works of art, but I find that they prefer New 杏吧原创.
Could you please explain why and how you produce this special attraction in
the outside surface of New 杏吧原创, and advise whether the art works
are subject to VAT.
Letters : Smokers' guts
Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
I read with great interest the story about the possibility of DNA finding its
way into cells (This Week, 4 January, p 14).
I am a retired plant virologist. I used to work at what is now Horticultural
Research International at Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, then the National
Vegetable Research Station. I carried out this particular investigation out of
my own interest rather than on the official research programme.
In our work, tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) was common both as an isolate from
plants for diagnosis and as a contaminant. Some was suspected to originate from
smokers. Almost all cigarette tobacco is heavily infected with TMV and lots of
viable virus can be extracted from saliva on wet butts. Therefore it was
possible to get one’s hands contaminated so the normal regime of effective hand
washing was strictly observed.
It occurred to me that the smokers must swallow quite large amounts of TMV
during the course of their addiction and I wondered what happened to the virus
in the gut. Thus I, as a nonsmoker, ate a salad sandwich with a few TMV-infected
Nicotiana clevelandii leaves. I then monitored my faeces using
electron microscope grids treated with TMV antisera. Sure enough, TMV appeared.
Observations under the scanning electron microscope showed TMV particles
sticking out of faecal lumps like pins out of a pincushion.
TMV particles are rods, 300 x 18 nanometres in size, and are very strong,
rigid and sharp. When leaf surfaces are rubbed with TMV and then inspected in
the electron microscope, the rods can be seen sticking out like darts at varying
lengths. So what was happening in my gut?
This was a one-off experiment without any controls and there was no
encouragement to continue. I did look for all sorts of viruses on door handles
and commonly handled objects and found plenty! Thus I open toilet doors with
gloves and am careful with supermarket trolley handles.
Letters : Growth and quality
St Albans, Hertfordshire
“Sustainability”, “environmental degradation”, “ecological hazards” are words
which do not appear in the Conservative Party’s key policies for British science
(Forum, 25 January, p 47).
On the other hand, the frequent appearance of words (and their derivatives)
such as “industry”, “firms”, “business”, “companies”, “enterprise”, “defence”,
“competitiveness”, “market economy”, “effectiveness” and “priority” underlines
the fact that the party is still married to the belief that unrestrained
economic growth will “extend the quality of active life”.
There is ample evidence of the increasing damage which unrestrained economic
growth continues to inflict on the biosphere and its life-support systems. If we
are to reverse this trend, policy makers simply must adopt the concept of
sustainability.
Reshaping the policies for energy, transport, industry, agriculture, food,
fisheries, education, and so on to move us towards sustainability should be the
highest priority of any government. Certainly, the incorporation of the concept
of sustainability into all areas of research and development should be at the
core of any science policy.
Letters : . . .
Manitoba, Canada
If ever there is going to be a transference with genetic resistance to
antibiotics, the place to look is not down on the farm, but in the bedrooms and
living rooms of the nation.
At the present time, an eight-year-old child can walk into virtually any pet
store in North America and purchase antibiotics across the counter for a few
dollars a pack. Ampicillin, tetracyline, erythromycin and neomycin are just a
few of the widely available drugs.
In most cases the drugs are formulated to be water soluble and used as a
bath. In millions of homes across the continent, every kid with a sick goldfish
will, at some stage, be putting combinations of antibiotics into the fish tank.
As one product fails so another is tried. Eventually the poor fish succumbs and
the whole lot is dumped down the toilet bowl or sink.
I suspect the total volume of antibiotics sold in the pet fish industry is
quite staggering. It is time someone took a closer look at this widespread
misuse.
Letters : Link by link
by e-mail
Kurt Kleiner underestimates the damage that a few misguided and foolish
individuals could cause to the World Wide Web (“Surfing prohibited”, 25 January,
p 28). Linking is the fundamental underlying philosophy of the Web and what
makes it such a powerful information resource. Remove the ability to link freely
and the Web collapses.
I have spoken with many users of the Web. These attempts to block linking
have no support from users and such action is met with derision and contempt. I
have yet to meet any Web publisher who supports these moves.
It is a clash of old publishing and new. And yet what the old is objecting to
is commonplace in its own medium. If I were to write an article I may have
several references. To not quote my sources would, if nothing else, be a lack of
courtesy. The Web is no different, the only difference is the underlying
technology that brings up the references instantly (at least that is the
theory). Academic reputations (often undeservedly so) are built on the number of
times that the author is cited.
My concern on this is so great that last year I published a Web page on the
topic:http://www.i-way.co.uk/~reality/sunrise/unravel.htm
Letters : Feed them drugs
Bristol
The suggestion that antibiotics in animal feeds pose only a small theoretical
risk to human health overlooks two key papers (“Hooked on drugs”, 18 January, p
24). In 1994, a team led by Janice Bates at the John Radcliffe Hospital Oxford,
found vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) in patients who
had not been in hospital and traced back the resistance in several cases to farm
animals. And a paper presented in July last year by Wolfgang Witte from the
Robert Koch Institute in Germany details a study in a rural area where VRE was
found in farm animals and disseminated via meat products.
In addition to the problem of drug resistance, it is worth noting that the
widespread use of antibiotics in the feed of adult cattle only dates from the
ban on hormone implants in the mid-1980s and mirrors the rise of both
E. coli 0157 and Salmonella typhimurium DT104, two new food
poisoning organisms which, unlike earlier strains, affect adult cattle.
The possibility that antibiotics could increase selective pressure for the
development of new bacterial strains was set out in 1969 in the Swann report,
which urged extreme caution. Despite this the overall use of in-feed antibiotics
has increased considerably.
Might we now be reaping the rewards of an over-relaxed attitude to this whole
area?
Letters : No anonymity
Liverpool
Barry Fox has outlined ways in which callers can abuse telephone polling
systems, and even how attempts to block multiple calls by the use of Caller Line
Identification (CLI), can be circumvented if the caller uses 141 to remain
anonymous (Technology, 18 January, p 20, and Letters, 8 February, p 50).
However, recently I have found this to not always be the case. Even if 141 is
used, a caller’s identity can still be released to certain organisations. I use
a cheap international phone carrier, which recently introduced an improved
access service, by allowing users to log in from certain nominated numbers
automatically using CLI to bypass their password system.
Intrigued, I tried calling their service from one of my nominated numbers,
inserting 141 before their freephone number. Surprisingly, my call was still
registered automatically. It seems organisations can still receive caller
information even if you withhold your number. Whether this is applicable to
telephone polling services remains to be seen.
I don’t think anyone would object to their number being automatically
released to the likes of the emergency services, but I would be interested to
know where the line is drawn with respect to commercial organisations.
Letters : . . .
Braintree, Essex
What worries me, as a primary school teacher, is that we still teach children
that there are seven colours in a rainbow, and that we have five senses. It’s as
though we had no sense of temperature (spread widely through our bodies, like
touch) or balance (in an identifiable organ, like hearing or sight), not to
mention more cognitive ones, like sense of direction, or overlooked ones, like
our sensing of the way our limbs are orientated at any moment.
Letters : Smelling together
Conwy, North Wales
I read with interest the article about our possible sixth sense (“The sixth
sense”, 25 January, p 36). It has always fascinated me that women living closely
together eventually synchronise their menstrual cycles. Could the vomeronasal
organ mediate this phenomenon, I wonder?
If so, the implications could be interesting, and profitable. Imagine a
contraceptive which utilised and manipulated this forgotten sense. Perhaps the
birth control of the future could be housed in a cologne bottle or be mixed with
the air freshener. Women wishing to ensure fertility might have to go around
with a nose clip on.
Letters : Goodbye, Marconi . . .
Southend, Essex
. . . and good riddance, it seems.
Does it matter when we disperse at auction a major archive of scientific and
technical papers, photographs and historic artefacts encapsulating the very
origins of a major science-led industry? Some might think not, but that is
exactly what GEC will shortly do with the complete archive of the Marconi
Company鈥� at Christie’s in London, on 24 and 25 April.
It is clear from Christie’s press release that this material is an
unparalleled record of the origins and development of “wire-less”
communications, worldwide, and as such would be of first importance to maritime,
military and general historians. Part of the tragedy is that this collection has
been so little studied, and that no attempt was made to display it during the
Marconi Centenary Year. Nor has any worthwhile monograph seen recent
publication.
International interest in this auction will be very great; and in the absence
of intervention, dispersal abroad is likely. The Royal Commission on Historic
Manuscripts and the National Heritage Memorial Fund should consider this case as
a matter of urgency.
Meanwhile, where are our national museums and professional institutions who
should surely be exercising a watching brief? And if this sale goes
through鈥攚hat other major institutions will see fit to follow in taking the
car-boot sale approach to their (and our) historical inheritances?
Letters : . . .
Glasgow
You report that large commercial organisations wish to ban use of their World
Wide Web addresses, barring explicit permission. Of course, none of these
companies would ever consider using, or, even worse, buying and selling, my
physical address without my explicit permission. Which leaves an interesting
question: how come I still get junk mail?
Letters : . . .
Bath
There is little point in using laws in this area. The idea makes about as
much sense as passing laws against computer viruses, antisocial though these are
(just count the prosecutions).
The only sensible scheme is for authors themselves to control who gets to see
what they write using strong encryption (“Psst . . . don’t tell Uncle Sam”, 25
January, p 12). Anyone can get hold of a free copy of the PGP encryption program
for their PC or workstation (see http://www.ifi.uio.no/pgp) and鈥攊f they
wish to restrict access鈥攃ontrol exactly who can and who cannot see their
writing.
This effectively protects their copyright without recourse to all that
expensive nonsense in court, and it has the added bonus of keeping the eyes of
authority off too.
Letters : . . .
Los Angeles
A hyperlink is not analogous to a library catalogue card, it’s analogous to a
footnote or endnote reference. If you take that analogy, you avoid all of the
problems with linking to copyrighted material.
No one is required to get the permission of the copyright holder to reference
his material in a publication. It is a pointer for the reader to follow if he or
she so desires and doesn’t require anyone’s permission to do so.
Hyperlinks only become analogous to library catalogue cards when they are
incorporated in the output of search engines such as Yahoo or AltaVista. In both
instances, the law is clear.
It boggles my mind that so much time and energy is being expended on
something for which a very substantial precedent already exists.