Cleared debris
I can confirm Feedback’s experience of being sent bogus messages by a John
Debri, who purports to be an account manager at CompuServe
(Feedback, 21 November).
I was in Paris last month installing CompuServe for a friend. We performed
the sign-up process and within 15 minutes a message came back from John Debri
with the title “Problem with your account”. The speed of the reply completely
threw me and only by the merest chance did my personal details not get sent back
to Debri. You were lucky in that the messages were so slow in coming and you
were on the alert.
I am pleased that you have published details of the scam and the complacent
response from Martin Turner (Letters, 21 November, p 62).
It is clear that there is a security problem.
Letter
The unenviable situation faced by Craig Webster, whose credit card number was
used fraudulently over the Internet
(Letters, 21 November, p 62),
is another outcome of plastic card fraud which last year cost UK banks and building
societies 拢122 million.
Although Internet purchases are subject to a variety of security checks by
banks and retailers to establish that orders are genuine before payment is
authorised, cardholders are advised to take the following precautions:
1. Only give your card and personal details to retailers who use secure
transaction technology. A retailer should state clearly on their home page that
secure technology is used.
2. Ensure the security feature in your browser is switched on.
3. Never give your bank card personal identification number (PIN) to anyone,
not even the police or your bank manager.
Last year incidence of plastic card fraud increased by 26 per cent on the
previous year. Being a victim of this kind of fraud is stressful and
frustrating, as Mr Webster can testify, and it is an issue that demands our
awareness and caution.
Smells as sweet
In David Concar’s article on genetically modified roses
(“Brave New Rose”, 31 October, p 30),
he refers to the fact that most cut roses have no odour as a
“sorry state of affairs”. But the idea that modern roses do not have a perfume
is false.
The perfume of many of the roses introduced in the past 50 years, such as
Wolkendurfte (Fragrant Cloud), can knock your head off. Gardeners continue to
take the word of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) that modern roses do not have a
scent. They forget that by the time modern roses had been introduced, she was
too old to smell them. The modern roses of her time were derived from Rosa
chinensis, which had no perfume to speak of.
The “sorry state of affairs” might have applied to rose breeding in 1898 but
not to our own time. I hope NovaFlora is not barking up the wrong rose bush.
Herbal hazards
Wainwright Churchill writes that herbal medicine, when used by qualified
herbalists, is extremely safe, much safer than conventional drugs
(Letters, 14 November, p 59). How does he know?
A system to adequately report adverse reactions to herbal preparations sold
over the counter has yet to be established. So their nature and true number is
largely unknown. Furthermore, such reactions tend to be under-reported. Data
from our department and others suggest that about a quarter of herbal remedy
users would consult their general practitioner for a serious adverse reaction to
a conventional over-the-counter medicine, but not for a similar reaction to a
herbal remedy.
Synchronise watches
I enjoyed the joke about the packet of cheese stamped “best before Jan 99 AD”
on a flight from Taiwan to London
(Feedback, 21 November), but it got me
thinking: perhaps some airlines specify AD to avoid confusion between the
different calendars in use around the world.
For instance, as well as being 98 it is also 92 (1992, Ethiopic), 59 (5759,
Hebrew), 77 (1377, Persian), 15 (1715, Coptic) and 19 (1419, Islamic). Given
that airports employ local people, the identifier AD might come in handy. If
airlines don’t do something like this already, perhaps they should.
Free lunch
Feedback
(7 November)
muses on the true meaning of the phrase “95 per cent
fat-free”. I suggest that a more natural reading of the phrase is that the
product is 95 per cent fat, but for this part you are not charged.
Green growth
Your magazine mistakenly attributes to Brazil an “interest in making
voluntary commitments” on greenhouse gas emission reductions
(This Week, 7 November, p 14).
Brazil considers voluntary commitments by developing countries to be
extraneous to the letter and to the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol. Industrialised
nations failed to live up to their Rio 1992 commitment to reduce their emissions
to 1990 levels. Their Kyoto commitments came after almost a decade of strong
emissions growth. The ultimate success or failure of the protocol thus hinges on
the fulfilment of those emission reduction goals, both through efforts at home
and the use of flexibility mechanisms.
As to the latter, the effective implementation of the Clean Development
Mechanism鈥攐riginally a Brazilian proposal鈥攚ill enable developing
nations to establish a cleaner path to development through cooperation,
technology development and investment projects, thus significantly contributing
to reductions in emissions.
Signal delay
We were surprised to read your news item on the recent detection by Jesus
Pando, David Valls-Gabaud and Li-Zhi Fang of a non-Gaussian signal in cosmic
background radiation data collected by NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite
(This Week, October 31, p 5).
This suggests, incorrectly, that this was the first detection of such a signal.
On 17 July 1997 The Astrophysical Journal published a paper
of ours entitled “Evidence for non-Gaussianity in the COBE DMR four year sky
maps” (vol 503, p L1). A version of it has been available since March of this
year at http://xxx.sissa.it/abs/astro-ph/9803256.
The scientific community is aware of our work. It has been the focus of an
article in Nature (vol 395, p 639). After our result was made public
two more groups reported similar findings before Pando and colleagues (see
/astro-ph/9809238 and /astro-ph/9803321). In highlighting the
statement that “other groups have looked hard and failed to find such effects”,
you are grossly misrepresenting the current state of the field.
The article emphasised that this is the first time such a detection has
been made and its direction in the sky identified, an important new step beyond
merely detecting the signal鈥擡d
Will to conserve
Fred Pearce’s article about foreign wildlife groups pulling out of African game reserves
(This Week, 7 November, p 16)
was correct and informative on the changes that the World
Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and other conservation
organisations are making in their international policies. But I think he misses,
or fails to highlight, the two key reasons behind these changes.
WWF and others have realised that in the end the solutions to all
conservation problems are political. You can erect as many fences as you like
and study the ecosystem indefinitely, but unless the governments, both local and
national, are behind conservation moves, all these efforts are doomed.
They have realised that not only do you need the governments on side, but you
also need the people. To have scientists and conservationists from developed
countries telling the inhabitants of less developed countries what to do is a
recipe for disaster. While the purchasing of areas of rainforest and other
important areas to preserve biodiversity can be seen as an important part of the
overall conservation effort, until we all recognise the political and human
elements in the equation we will not win the battle.
He who dares
Your article “ISS Titanic” points to the high chances that something will go
wrong with the International Space Station
(14 November, p 38).
When Columbus embarked on his journey across the
Atlantic, there was an extremely high chance
of something going wrong. That didn’t stop him. Every mission into space carries
a risk. While the ISS does run a chance of failure, the possibility of
scientific finds that would benefit everyone compensates for this chance.
SETI sleuths
Your Newswire story about an Australian project to search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) leaves out one key adjective: amateur
(This Week, 21 November, p 25).
The story actually refers to an amateur group in
Queensland which would like to undertake a SETI project.
A professional Australian SETI project is being run by the University of
Western Sydney Macarthur, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation’s (CSIRO) 64-metre Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales.
This is a long-term project, currently scanning eight million radio channels
every 1.7 seconds and piggybacked onto normal radio astronomy observations. The
radio astronomy data are simply analysed in a different way to look for signs of
cosmic intelligence. This includes an all-sky survey currently discovering an
average of one new galaxy a day and a pulsar experiment that is finding one new
pulsar an hour. Interested readers can find out more from our website at:
http://seti.uws.edu.au.
Faithful fools
Monogamy is not so much a single strategy as a range of different strategies
(“Your cheatin’ heart”, 21 November, p 28).
Rating sexual exclusiveness on a
scale of 1 to 10, we might class baboon-type promiscuity as 1, polygyny as 5,
“cheating monogamy” as 7 to 9 (depending on the amount of cheating), and
faithful monogamy as 10. Human societies are all monogamous in some sense, but
range from about 6 to 10 on this scale, from the relative sexual freedom and
occasional polygyny of most hunter gatherer peoples, to the strict sexual mores
of, say, Orthodox Jews or Mormons.
Although most species seem to have a common type of sexual behaviour, this
can change in response to food conditions. Normally promiscuous baboons are more
likely to form one-male troops when food is short. And monogamous Mentaweian
langurs become polygynous when moving into deforested areas where food is
plentiful. Monogamy is one of a range of behaviours that includes
territoriality, lower sex drive, timidity, training of offspring and intensive
foraging, which are helpful in stable (and therefore chronically food-limited)
environments such as tropical forests. In these highly competitive societies,
there is no downside to sexual exclusiveness.
At the other extreme, a very dangerous savanna environment demands
cooperation and makes jealousy a liability. And the very fact of predation,
which keeps numbers below the level of food supplies, works to bring this about.
In any society, an individual balances the advantages of monopolising a sexual
partner against group solidarity. Where the line is drawn depends on the
environment.
Incidentally, the same mechanism is found in humans, but operates very
differently. Sexual exclusiveness is stronger not so much in poor societies as
in those with advanced economic and political systems. My belief is that human
cultures change behaviour in ways that “fool” our bodies into thinking we are
hungry when we are not, thus creating the impersonal, disciplined, hard-working
individuals who make civilisation possible. In effect, a physiological mechanism
designed to adjust behaviour to environment has been hijacked for a totally
different purpose. For more details see http://www.hungryape.com.
Letter
Robin Dunbar reminds us that, like other animals, we have sexual instincts
that have an unconscious biological agenda. But being social animals, we have
more to pass down to our offspring than our genes.
Sex is not for procreation alone but is also an act of bonding that helps to
keep parents together. A couple may mate thousands of times, well past
child-bearing years, but produce only a handful of children. Its purpose is,
surely, to maintain a loving relationship so that they are able to provide a
stable environment in which their children can develop and “inherit” the social
equivalent of genes鈥攕kills, culture and knowledge passed on by parents,
teachers and others.
If so, it could be argued that it doesn’t matter too much if a man rears a
child that is not biologically his, because he can still influence that child’s
inheritance. To some extent that could overshadow the effects of the genes
inherited from the biological father.
Letter
The statement that Christianity “enshrines the idea that humans are a
monogamous species” is historically erroneous. Ninety-eight per cent of the Old
Testament, and some of the New, tells of infidelities, polygamies and other
sexual meanderings.
Christianity has always recognised that humans have a “cheatin’ heart”,
explaining it as a consequence of “The Fall”鈥攁 calamitous (but not total)
loss of virtue. Indeed, the Christian religion holds out monogamy as an ideal, a
hope, a way to perfection for both individuals and society.
Hard bones
I would like to make a correction to your report on the German group that has
synthesised pearls in the lab by mimicking the assembly of calcium carbonate on proteins
(This Week, 7 November, p 29).
You are right that calcium salts are deposited on collagen (protein).
However, teeth and bones are formed predominantly from calcium phosphate, not
carbonate, which accounts for only up to eight per cent of mammalian bone. On
maturing, the amorphous calcium phosphate becomes crystalline hydroxyapatite,
Ca5(OH)(PO4)3.