Correction:
In Figure 2 of “Control Centre” (Inside Science, No 122, New
杏吧原创, 17 July) the nucleosomes are incorrectly labelled as H1 histones. In
fact, H1 histones clamp together each stack of eight histone subunits, around
which a DNA strand is wrapped, to form the nucleosomes.
Letter
You claim that banning hunting “will help increase rural unemployment”. Yet,
in an independent report published last year, Neil Ward of Newcastle University
concluded: “Any claims that large numbers of jobs will automatically be lost
following a ban cannot be sustained by reference to any evidence.”
You claim that this is an issue of people in towns making decisions that
affect country people. However, polling has consistently shown that the majority
of people living in the countryside are opposed to hunting with dogs鈥�75
per cent, according to the most recent MORI poll. This level of opposition to
hunting is not surprising given the disruption to their lives and damage to
their property that country people suffer because of hunts.
The fundamental issue, which you neglect, is whether a modern society should
tolerate the deliberate setting of one animal on another for “sport”.
Letter
If, as you suggest, foxes will suffer more through being shot than being
hunted (which seems unlikely), they should be protected from being shot as well.
This is an argument to ban shooting, not to legalise hunting.
Cicada choirs
Kathryn Brown says that periodical cicadas live only in the US
(17 July, p 32).
But where I grew up, Tamborine Mountain in central eastern Australia, the
“razor grinder” (Henicopsaltria eydouxii) appears in vast numbers at
intervals of seven years. According to Max Moulds’s book Australian
Cicadas, no study of the life history of any Australian species has been
made, but a seven-year cycle for the razor grinder seems reasonably certain.
Moulds quotes similar observations indicating a seven-year cycle for
Cyclochila australasiae, which in its various forms goes by the names of
greengrocer, yellow monday, masked devil, chocolate soldier and blue moon.
Cicadas don’t sting or bite, and they make lots of noise, thus ensuring the
attention of children and hence such colourful names.
I have counted over 50 razor grinders on the side of a tree trunk facing me,
with a similar density around the rest of trunk and on every large tree over
acres of forest. They make so much noise that it is too painful to remain among
them for any length of time.
Seeing language
Bob Holmes describes the new world of “visual language” being developed by Bob Horn and his team
(10 July, p 32). His belief that the amalgamation of words
and images provides a more efficient form of communication is no doubt well
founded. But is this method of communication really the next revolutionary step,
or is it simply the end of an evolutionary cycle that started with cave
paintings?
Are the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians the original form of Horn’s
visual language? And if so, is the only revolution swapping a computer screen
for a stone wall?
Letter
As a lawyer, I often work with obscurantist blocks of jargon-ridden text,
which can be converted into intelligible English (even if the underlying
concepts are difficult) simply by the intelligent use of headings, paragraphs
and subparagraphs. This deals purely with verbal information and therefore
probably does not give us the “easier time linking up the pieces” offered by
simultaneously using other pathways in the brain to process nonverbal
information.
I suspect that the distinction between text and images may be an
oversimplification.
Cuppa protection
Rob Edwards reports that Kachadpillill C. George found that caffeine
protected mice from radioactivity
(26 June, p 12). However, given the extremely
high doses involved, I’m surprised he mentioned coffee rather than tea. The
concentration of caffeine is only 1.08 per cent in raw coffee and 0.82 per cent
in roasted coffee, but it is between 4 and 5 per cent in tea.
If caffeine does protect people from radioactivity, tea will certainly be a
better drink than coffee.
It's alive
When lecturing to horticultural students each year, I go to great lengths to
explain that pollen is not equivalent to animal sperm, as the subheading of Gail
Vines’s entertaining article implies
(24 July, p 34).
Pollen is an actual “plant” just as, say, an oak tree is a plant. Sperm or
eggs are single-celled sex cells (gametes) that are made by meiosis, and then
fuse to make an embryo. Pollen is a multi-cellular organism containing several
cells and nuclei. Some are involved with running day to day cell activities,
others are responsible for growing the pollen tube, and lastly there is the
actual gamete or sex cell. The pollen of many gymnosperms actually germinates
and grows a pollen tube up to eight months before the gamete is released.
US was there
In contrast to the statement in your editorial
(10 July, p 3), you may be
interested to know that the US was indeed a full participant in the recent World
Conference on Science organised by UNESCO and the International Council for
Science.
The high-calibre US national delegation had twenty members drawn from the
political and scientific spheres, and could boast amongst its number three Nobel
laureates and the President of the National Academy of Sciences.
Y10K problem
As programmers rush to solve the Y2K problem by assigning computer storage
for four digits in year-dates, it is surely not premature to raise the problem
of the rollover from December 9999 to January 10 000.
The Y10K problem could be every bit as threatening and dangerous as the
present millennial mix-up. I would have severe doubts, for example, about taking
a flight on 31 December 9999. The AIs will have bad headaches, at the very
least, and the problem could be much harder to solve with civilisation spread
over interstellar space. Please will computer programmers begin to assign five
digits to our year-dates, so that we do not get into this silly situation
again.
Days out
Andrew Bluemel’s 8000-year clock is going to be a couple of days out by the
time it runs out of year digits
(Letters, 24 July, p 59). The current rule for
leap days (every four years, except in century years not divisible by 400) gives
one leap day too many about every 3300 years.
The mean solar year is currently 365.24219 days, reducing by about half a
second a century, and the Gregorian calendar approximates this as 365.2425
days.
Henry's problem
Bryant Furlow speculates that the parasite responsible for syphilis evolved
to increase the victim’s libido and its chance of propagation
(24 July, p 42).
Wasn’t the over-sexed Henry VIII syphilitic? Could the Church of England owe
its origins to the amorous prompting of a social disease?
Now here’s a worrying thought: just how much epoch-making history might be
down to the body snatchers?
Moon musings
The concept of a large moon being necessary for life goes back even further
than Edward McSweegan suggests
(Letters, 17 July, p 56). Isaac Asimov, in
The Tragedy of the Moon (1972), comments on many related aspects at some
length.
He thinks that any evolution of land-based life would have been less likely
in the absence of major ocean tides caused by a nearby large moon. He discusses
how, in a solar system, the understanding of astronomy by any intelligent life
might be affected by whether their own and other planets have easily visible
moons. He also suggests that people living on a planet without an accessible
moon would not develop space travel.
Technology's revenge
I read with interest your piece on work and leisure
(10 July, p 53). Working
harder to improve your lifestyle, only to discover you have become a wage slave
with no life at all, is just one of the many perverse and perplexing “revenge
effects” of our technological age.
The myth that computers would allow us almost unlimited leisure time was
closely related to the myth of the paperless office. The reality is that, thanks
to ubiquitous fax machines, photocopiers and computer printers, offices now use
more paper than ever before. Other modern revenge effects include high-tech
sports safety equipment that can increase the number of severe injuries, low-tar
cigarettes that make you smoke more and antibiotics that can breed new and more
virulent bacteria.
A piece of technology can more easily be changed than the psychology of its
users, so the answer is to adapt technology to people rather than expecting
people to adapt to technology. Despite modern ergonomics and the simplicity of
this idea, little has been achieved along these lines.
Sloping uphill
Your editorial referred to the “slippery slope from banning fox hunting to vegetarianism”
(17 July, p 3). Elsewhere in the piece you say: “If you accept
[the] argument that a nervous system implies a capacity to experience pain, then
it is frankly hard to justify any form of hunting, including recreational
fishing, circuses, zoos and keeping almost any kind of caged pet.”
Millions of people in this country鈥擨 am definitely one of
them鈥攈eartily concur with such sentiments, and regard those who
deliberately inflict unnecessary pain on living creatures as cruel and
barbaric.
Far from being a slippery slope, this is an uphill struggle against ignorance
and apathy. The slippery slope is treating any nonhuman animal as if it were
incapable of feeling pain or terror.