Red-hot birdseed
Tom Sherman suggests sprinkling birdseed with cayenne pepper to deter grey squirrels (9 March, p 54). If only! I tried it this morning and waited for one of our resident squirrels to turn up on his rounds. When he arrived, he hoovered up his usual quota of peanuts, then swaggered up to the French windows to demand a lager and an onion bhaji.
During the Second World War my mother kept hens, which were fed on kitchen scraps boiled up with something called “balancer meal”. Before she tipped the bucket into the trough she would mix in a spoonful of a brick-red powder called “Karswood Poultry Spice” to tempt their appetites. Being a curious child I couldn’t resist tasting this seasoning and experienced my first chilli burn. If birds don’t have receptors for capsaicin, how did anyone get the idea of seasoning their food in this way?
Hourly rip-off
Feedback comments on the curious hourly rate for cleaners at Birmingham’s Aston University (9 March).
My employer, a well-known British supermarket chain, recently stuck a message on our wage slips informing us that our pay had increased over the four-week period. Imagine our joy when we read it had gone up from 拢4.82 to 拢4.8204 per hour.
Organic, but riddled with disease
So it seems that organic soups are higher in salicylic acid, making them healthier (16 March, p 10). But as Rob Edwards reports, plants stockpile salicylic acid when attacked by disease organisms. Since organic farmers are prohibited from using most pesticides and fungicides to stop disease, it is obvious that organic soups and perhaps other processed organic products are more often made with diseased produce.
Fungal crop disease causes a build-up of allergenic proteins and carcinogenic mycotoxins. These dangerous chemicals have no place in food. Shouldn’t we be screening organic baby food for such by-products?
Incidentally, the recommended dose of salicylic acid for improving circulation, taken as aspirin, is between 100 and 300 milligrams a day. Going by the figures Edwards quotes, this would mean eating 1000 litres of organic soup a day. An aspirin tablet is cheaper and safer.
Nukes in the dock
Your correspondent Ian Miller seems to have confused third-party liability insurance for the nuclear industry with first-party property damage insurance (16 March, p 57).
Certain hazards are excluded for a whole portfolio of businesses, but not because they are intrinsically likely to occur. They are excluded because if they occurred, the claims that mounted up could leave the insurer insolvent. Acts of war, radioactive contamination and, in some countries, earthquakes, are risks of this type.
Whether a nuclear energy company is liable to provide compensation if there is a release of radioactive material from one of its sites is an entirely different question. A nuclear company is obliged under statute to take out insurance for such liability on a “no fault” basis. Organisations such as British Nuclear Insurers exist specifically to provide that cover, and in so doing we represent the national insurance market as a whole rather than simply one single insurer.
Of course, any catastrophe, whether natural or man-made, could exhaust the resources of any enterprise, be it a power generator or an insurance provider, and it’s normal to expect the government to step in under such circumstances.
If one were to make the nuclear industry financially responsible for the most catastrophic nuclear accident that’s theoretically possible, one would also expect to see fossil fuel generators made responsible for the costs of cleaning up the forests they have destroyed and the waterways they have poisoned through the release of toxic gases that have fallen to Earth as acid rain.
How is it affirmative?
Your editorial on race and science uses the phrase “affirmative action” (9 March, p 3). This is just a new way of saying “positive discrimination”. And how many times does it have to be said that there’s nothing positive about discrimination?
Ring-fencing fellowships and grants for people from particular racial backgrounds does not create equality. It creates bigger problems. I’ve seen first-hand the resentment caused when people feel they have been passed over because they were the “wrong” colour, or from the “wrong” background. Nor can it be particularly pleasant to know that you were chosen not for your actual skills and abilities, but because you were the “right” colour, race or sex to fill some quota somewhere.
Does colour matter? I believe it shouldn’t. Affirmative action makes it matter. Treating people differently due to their colour, race or sex, no matter how good the intention, makes it matter. You want more black scientists? Fight for inclusive, quality, non-discriminatory education. Not even more discrimination.
It's healthy, period
Stopping menstrual periods isn’t difficult (16 March, p 38). The question, as you acknowledge, is not “Can we?”, but “Should we?”
Women with periods tend to live longer than men, and when their periods cease, their mortality rate progressively approaches that of their less fortunate partners.
One could even suggest that the human female’s propensity to outlive males depends on menstruation, at least in First World countries. I was reminded of this when I saw one of my patients only last week.
She suffers from haemochromatosis, in which organs absorb excessive amounts of iron. She did not, however, have a particularly high level of iron in her blood, and although 45 years old she had suffered none of the expected problems such as liver damage. I asked her why, and she told me that she was “blessed by having very heavy periods” all her life.
When her doctors tried to stop her periods with hormones, her blood count rose dangerously. Off the hormones, she menstruated her way back to health again.
There is a strong argument that, in First World countries at least, the health benefits of lowering iron levels outweigh the risks of anaemia. Higher iron levels in the blood are associated with higher rates of oxidation of cholesterol and higher rates of tissue damage from free radicals. This type of damage has been associated with heart disease, cancer risk and degenerative diseases such as dementia and arthritis.
I watch dismayed as my profession continues to interfere with the normal function and physiology of women, most obviously in fertility control, through HRT and during childbirth. It seems we are still terrified of the “hysterical” woman and simply can’t stop asking the same old question鈥�”Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
Flat-Earth Tony
Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently wants creationism to take its deserved place alongside evolution in the science curriculum. Why not add other good scientific ideas such as phrenology, astrology and tarot reading? The likes of Steve Jones and Richard Dawkins, not to mention Darwin, must be put in their place.
By the way, please thank Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell for saving Christopher Columbus from falling off the edge of the Earth.
Fine-tuned canoes
Your article on the concrete sub mentioned a flexible concrete canoe that outperformed the competition (9 March, p 36).
I read an article in Scientific American a year or two ago that described Inuit canoes that were built to be flexible and were paddled at the best resonant frequency for speed. Their resonance could be “tuned” by placing different stones of different weights in the bow and/or stern.
Wasted words
Coca-Cola’s patent on a talking bottle top appears to be evidence that our society has completely lost the plot (9 March, p 23). Coca-Cola proposes discarding a battery, speaker and chip after a single use, rather than just print the message on the underside of the cap. Perhaps this gimmick will sell a few more bottles鈥攂ut what a waste of material and intellectual resources.
Maybe at 46 I’m a boring old fart, but we really do have to move away from being a throw-away society.
Lots of millennia
In your article on asteroids melting the Earth’s surface, you write that this bombardment was 3.9 billion years ago, whereas the earliest evidence for life is dated to 3.85 billion years ago, “just a few millennia after the asteroid attacks” (9 March, p 7). But the difference between these two times is 50 million years, or 50,000 millennia. That’s quite a few millennia.
While 50 million years seems short compared to 3900 million years, it is about equal to the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene epochs put together. A lot of evolution can occur in that time.
Look it up
What is meant by “(DOI 10.1021/jf010889i)” in the item about rum (9 March, p 25)?
Some journal papers published online now have an identification number such as a “DOI number”. The identification number applies to papers that are only published online, and therefore don’t have a page number (which is how we usually reference journal articles). It also applies to papers that are published online in advance of print, and so don’t have a page number yet.
If you go to a journal site and want to search for a paper, one of the search options (as well as author/title and so on) is to search by the DOI. You put in the number above and it takes you straight to the paper in question.
You can also access papers via the DOI website by typing dx.doi.org/ followed by the DOI number. This means you don’t even have to go to the journal site altogether and is useful if, for example, the site’s address has changed.
At New 杏吧原创 we’re quoting DOI numbers more and more, as it becomes more common for papers to be published online instead of, or in advance of, print鈥擡d
Don't listen and drive
Has Warren Brodsky considered why fast-tempo music has a detrimental effect on our ability to drive sensibly (16 March, p 8)? Until quite recently the functioning of the sacculus, which forms part of the inner ear, was thought to be restricted to our sense of balance. But some recent research has shown that it responds to sound, and particularly loud bass tones.
Most people find the stimulation of the sacculus pleasurable鈥攑erhaps because it is linked with mating calls in lower vertebrates. Did Brodsky’s subjects experience the music in this way? If so, we may have a good starting point for finding out how our response to fast music really works.
Letter
As someone who listens to a lot of fast music, I wonder what kind of music the people in this study normally listened to. Perhaps people who are acclimatised to fast music are less affected by it, and vice versa.