Rights for all
I am no animal activist, neither am I a scientist defending research on
animals. So I speak from a reasonably neutral position. But I do object to being
forced to choose between a child and an ape
(Editorial, 13 February, p 3).
Surely this is all about inclusiveness, not choice. I would want to protect
both the child and the ape鈥攁nd any other animal鈥攁gainst pain and
suffering. Unfortunately, no legal system on Earth can ever guarantee that. We
cannot even protect ourselves from each other. Still, I applaud the attempt to
give apes legal rights because it helps us explore new ways of being.
And a final thought: we can only hope that if we ever meet extraterrestrials,
they will give us legal rights, despite our lowly position in the Universe.
Rotten business
There are serious scientific issues involved in the debate over landfill
sites and global warming
(This Week, 23 January, p 22, and
Letters, 13 February, p 54).
It is now generally accepted that the degradation of lignin, the fibrous
material found in wood and an important component of paper, is very much slower
within landfill sites where air is excluded (anaerobic degradation) than it is
under natural conditions such as in forest litter.
It is not true to say that wood never rots. The cellulosic material in wood
(and paper) degrades readily and in so doing, contributes to the greenhouse gas
methane that is generated in landfill sites. In contrast, the lignin degrades
very slowly, so slowly that the significance of its contribution to the total
greenhouse gas emissions from a landfill site is open to question.
When lignin is broken down under natural conditions as part of forest litter,
it produces carbon dioxide. Because this is assimilated by growing vegetation,
there is no net effect on the balance of greenhouse gases as long as the forest
continues to grow. The question that has been put to the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change is whether slowing down the degradation of lignin by burying
it in a landfill site causes living vegetation to extract carbon dioxide from
the atmospheric “reserve”, so bringing about a net overall reduction in the
total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
To answer this, it is necessary to take into account the impact on the
greenhouse gas balance of the entire process鈥攆elling, transporting and
processing the timber, making the paper, manufacturing the paper products,
collecting and transporting the wastes and burying them in the landfill
site.
This type of detailed life cycle analysis is not an easy task. Outcomes are
sometimes surprising and often counter-intuitive. Consigning wood and paper to
landfill might come out of it less well than the US suggests, but then so might
some paper recycling operations. Let us wait until the study has been completed
before jumping to conclusions.
Saint's theory
Paul Davies discusses the idea that material objects may be a secondary
manifestation of primal information
(Editorial, 30 January, p 3).
Davies states: “This idea was first proposed by the American physicist John Archibald
Wheeler and expressed in 1989 in his pithy phrase “it from bit”.”
While Wheeler is a great physicist, neither he nor the 18th-century
empiricist philosopher Bishop Berkeley (mentioned in Robert Matthews’s
enlightening article) can claim to be the first to have proposed this idea.
Before I say who actually was the first, I must state that I am not
particularly religious, except maybe in the Einsteinian sense of standing in awe
before nature. But I do I believe in fairness. So let me quote from John
(chapter 1, verse 1):
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God: and the word was
God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by it, and
without it was made nothing that was made.”
Admittedly, John’s way of expressing the idea is by no means as pithy as
Wheeler’s, but it still conveys the identical concept. And it was written over
1900 years ago.
Gas for dinner
In the past, many mines in Britain used a system of methane drainage to
extract the gas and sell it to British Gas, so that instead of blowing miners up
it ended up cooking their dinner (This Week, 30 January, p 17).
A pattern of three holes would be made behind the coal face, two into the roof and one into
the floor. As the face moved forward, more holes would be made at 10-metre
intervals. The gas was piped to the surface, some used at the mine and the
remainder sold.
The method was first used in 1943 at Mansfeld colliery in the Ruhr. After the
war it was adopted at many of the pits in Briatin. In many cases, the mines
could not have worked without methane drainage.
Point of Ayr Colliery in North Wales had dual-fuelled engines that could
generate electric power using either diesel alone or, at the flick of a switch,
95 per cent methane and 5 per cent diesel.
In the 1950s, Stafford Colliery was selected by the then Ministry of Fuel and
Power for tests with gas turbines. One scheme was to use the methane drainage
system to heat some of the air that had been discharged from the upcast shaft
and to extract much of the methane for the turbines with the aid of very fine
coal dust.
They said it
I was amazed to read the comment from Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research,
which refereed to Japan’s reduced whaling following a fire on its factory ship.
It said that “although the sample size may be smaller than that of the original
plan, the shortage of sample size will be covered by the large effort of whale sightings”
(Letters, 6 February, p 54).
This clearly implies that increased sightings can compensate for a decreased
catch. This is good news for the whales but why have we not been told this
before, and why weren’t previous years’ catches reduced as a result?
Biased and proud
In an otherwise excellent article on ProMED
(Forum, 6 February, p 50),
I was flabbergasted to read that the moderators of ProMED’s reports are “academic
scientists who volunteer their time and expertise鈥攁nd are thus unlikely to
have a political agenda”.
The plain fact is that whether someone is paid or unpaid says nothing about
their politics (bearing in mind that the huge majority of political activists
are volunteers). But more than that, surely the very purpose of organisations
like ProMED is to redress the political imbalance inherent in more official
organisations such as the WHO and so on. And it is a laudable purpose鈥攐ne
I fully support.
It does nothing to advance ProMED’s cause to claim such improbable
saintliness. Nail your colours firmly to the mast and to hell with a pious
neutrality that convinces no-one鈥攆riend or foe.
Coral culprits
In your report about diseased and ravaged coral reefs off the Florida Keys
(This Week, 30 January, p 11)
there is an account of the soil-dwelling fungus
Aspergillus attacking and killing corals. It is thought that the fungus
is washed into the ocean from land.
However, the mechanism by which the fungus is transported into the marine
environment is not discussed further. My suggestion is that it may be
transported by groundwater seepage rather than by surface water transport. In
this way the fungus, and indeed many other polluting substances, are injected
directly into the environment of the corals living along the Florida Keys.
Groundwater seepage and seafloor hydraulics have been overlooked when it
comes to discussing the wellbeing of corals around the world. Nobody really
knows whether the coral reefs are more dependent on offshore groundwater seepage
(springs on the seafloor) than on the quality of the surface water draining into
the ocean.
Researchers studying corals should start looking at the quality of
groundwater and the hydrology on the coasts adjacent to the “ravaged” coral
reefs. I am sure that corals are more dependent on the substratum environment
than people realise. If this is the case, they will react to the pollution of
onshore groundwater and to the “stealing” of groundwater by thirsty humans.
Perhaps it is not cyanide and explosives that are largely responsible for
worldwide coral devastation, but rather the flushing toilets in luxury seaside
hotels and homes. They reduce the hydraulic head of the groundwater and thus cut
the efficiency of offshore groundwater springs.
Letter
Who said New Zealand has never experimented on apes?
Perhaps you could find out what it was that I was experimenting on (and
feeding) at a major pathology unit in New Zealand in the 1960s?
I always believed it to be a chimpanzee.
Letter
Your editorial asked the reader to choose between a Kosovo orphan and a baby
chimp. This is a dishonest distinction. If I was asked to choose between my own
child and a Kosovo orphan, of course I would choose my own child. My
responsibilities and my attachments both diminish as I move away from the circle
of those I know and love. But they do not disappear to nothing.
When we show compassion to our fellow creatures, it is not to make them
somehow human, but to make ourselves more human.
More dark matter
In your article reviewing the various particles that could make up the dark
matter in the Universe
(“Space Oddity”, 16 January, p 24),
attention is called
to the DAMA experiment, located underground at the Gran Sasso Laboratory. This
has suggested a yearly variation in the detection rates of fossil heavy
particles.
This effect, if confirmed, would constitute a major breakthrough in our
knowledge of the Universe and of particle physics. Our group at the Department
of Theoretical Physics at the University of Turin has proved that the DAMA
results are consistent with a relic supersymmetric particle called a neutralino
being a major component of dark matter.
We have also presented the physical properties of this particle, as singled
out by the DAMA data, and discussed how these features may be tested. These
results can be found in our paper in Physics Letters B, vol
423, p 109.
Mercury madness
The article about mercury poisoning and Minamata disease appearing in South America
(This Week, 6 February, p 4)
comes as no surprise to me. I was watching
a programme on gold mining in the Amazon some three or four years ago when they
showed the miners cooking up gold and mercury in an open pan over an alcohol
burner. A miner’s head was immediately over the pan and he was certainly
inhaling mercury fumes. Then the interviewer asked the miner where they stored
the liquid mercury and he signalled his child to open his mouth. The child was
storing liquid mercury in his mouth because it was the “safest”, most convenient
location for storing this valuable asset.
The miners, their families and friends are all being daily exposed to mercury
at dangerous levels. They are also dumping the mercury-contaminated wastes
around their villages, thus contaminating their water and local food supplies.
The use of mercury in gold processing should be stopped immediately to prevent
the spread of Minamata disease.
Macho mice
I was concerned to hear of the advances in nurturing human sperm in mice or rats
(This Week, 13 February, p 4).
Such technology will only make it all the more difficult for men to address
the question when asked: “Are you a man or a mouse?”
Say that again
You report that Bosch have patented speech-recognition circuits that respond
only when given a command twice in quick succession
(This Week, 13 February, p 7).
This is apparently to avoid receiving unwanted commands from the TV or
radio.
How long will it be, I ask, before scriptwriters, in their search for ever
more realism, depict characters controlling equipment in just such a manner,
forcing Bosch, or some other enterprising company, to patent circuits that
require the command to be given three times?
Fifties fizz
Laurence Jay’s fishy sweets
(This Week, 13 February, p 7)
are very similar to the “bubble sub” found in Jamboree bags of the 1950s and early 1960s.
The small plastic sub, 35-millimetres long, was hollow except for a small
round reservoir at the centre. You tightly packed this reservoir with baking
powder and then dropped the sub into a glass of water.
As the baking powder fizzed the small gas bubbles would cause it to rise to
the top of the glass, turn over, release the gas bubbles and sink again. The sub
may not have been edible but the principle is the same.
Moving mountain
Michael Brooks has located Yucca Mountain in my home state of Arizona
(“Nuclear lifeline”, 16 January, p 30).
Please ask him to send it back to Nevada, to its location about 150
kilometres northwest of Las Vegas. Poor Arizona does not need any more of man’s
degradation.
Metric mysteries
Metrification mystification is not new
(Feedback, 6 February).
About 25 years
ago, I wanted a hardwood plank to finish off my newly installed patio door. The
receptionist at the builder’s merchant said the job could be done immediately
and directed me to the workshop. The foreman converted my inches to millimetres,
had the plank cut, gave it to me with the measurements and directed me to the
accounts office鈥攚here they converted it back to inches and worked out the
bill.
DIY fission
Feedback
(6 February)
implies that it is ludicrous to imagine that nuclear
fission could be demonstrated in schools. It can, however, be done very simply
and cheaply.
On 23 June 1939, the late C. E. Wynn-Williams and I had the honour of
demonstrating nuclear fission at a Royal Society conversazione. Taking our cue
from Otto Frisch, we used a simple air-filled ionisation chamber, one electrode
of which was coated with natural uranium oxide. The output of the amplifier
drove a loudspeaker and an oscillograph. The (weak) source of neutrons was a
capsule of radon and beryllium in a block of paraffin wax.
The huge number of alpha particles from the uranium produced the familiar
“noise” signal on the oscillograph and rushing noise from the speaker, but
occasionally large pulses and loud clicks appeared, caused by the sudden intense
ionisation produced by the flying fission fragments.
Even the neutron source was not essential, for the large pulses still
appeared, though extremely rarely, when it was removed. This we attribute to
spontaneous fission or cosmic neutrons. The demonstration would be far less
convincing, however, without the neutron source.
What Feedback had in mind, of course, was the difficulty of demonstrating in
schools not nuclear fission, but a nuclear chain reaction. With this I must agree.
Neglected tablets
I agree that the modern world can learn much from our ancient predecessors,
the Babylonians especially
(“In the shadow of the Moon”, 30 January, p 30).
However, I must put the record straight.
Babylonian tablets are scattered in museums across the world, not just in the
British Museum as was suggested by your article.
Also, Richard Stephenson’s comment on the fact that only 10 per cent of what
was recorded has ever been found鈥�”the other 90 per cent may have been
destroyed”鈥攊s incorrect.
The sad truth is that only half of the several thousand Babylonian tablets in
the British Museum have been catalogued (that is, their content has been
identified) and only 10 per cent have actually been translated.