Dope for the 10,000?
There is a plausible explanation for the sudden plummeting of times in 10,000-metre races by elite athletes (1 June, p 12). Although it is possible that sporting “freaks” can appear which defy explanation, the wholesale and consistent drops in 10,000-metre running times may suggest a more systematic cause such as blood doping.
The use of blood doping agents in the late 1980s and early 1990s was anecdotally linked to the commercial availability of recombinant human erythropoietin (r-HuEPO), which stimulates the body to produce more red blood cells. The slow and cumbersome task of collecting, storing and administering blood by cheating athletes to gain the aerobic benefits of increased blood mass and therefore oxygen-carrying capacity could now be achieved by just a few injections of r-HuEPO.
The authors of the Nature paper suggest that this trend could be due to anything from changes in the rules of the race to better equipment or the introduction of new drugs 鈥� be they legal or illegal 鈥� Ed.
Do vegans eat grass?
It is a fallacy that veganism can save the world from hunger (15 June, p 54), though it is true that much of modern agriculture has lost sight of the original purpose of livestock farming. This was to turn stuff that people cannot eat into food.
People cannot eat grass and straw, but ruminants can. People cannot eat small insects, worms, slugs, and scattered seeds, but poultry can. Pigs thrive on food that people have rejected.
In the western parts of Britain, for example, what grows best is grass, and meat and milk can be produced entirely from grass, grown on land which could not easily produce other human food.
There need be no grain diverted from human consumption to produce animal protein. This only happens as a product of contemporary economics.
Letter
It was obvious to anyone with a bit of experience in genetics and molecular biology that David Quist and Ignacio Chapella’s Nature article on Mexican maize should never have been published (15 June, p 14). I wrote to the editor the day the paper came out to point out the numerous flaws which demonstrated a failure of the refereeing process.
Nature unfortunately has a tendency to go for the “newsy” and this may have clouded its judgement in this case. Now it’s all good knockabout stuff to hint at some biotech conspiracy to silence Quist et al, but the science they present is unconvincing and does not meet the standards of science one would expect in a journal such as Nature.
The maize feud
Fred Pearce’s article repeats unfounded allegations about the Bivings Group currently being spread by anti-biotechnology activists (15 June, p 14).
The article repeats the charge that Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek are online personas used by The Bivings Group to combat a study on Mexican maize that originally appeared in Nature.
This is completely false. Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek are not employees or contractors or aliases of employees or contractors of The Bivings Group. In fact, The Bivings Group has no knowledge of either Mary Murphy or Andura Smetacek.
The article claims The Bivings Group admitted that “one of the emails” written by one of the aforementioned online personas “came from a Bivings’ employee or client”.
The Bivings Group has never made any statements to this effect. In making this claim, your article relies on other media sources that got this wrong.
Steel balls, glass balls
There is nothing more embarrassing for a chemistry postdoc than being unable to repeat a reaction performed by one of your predecessors. In a lab I worked in there was a notorious reaction that no one could get to work, although its discoverer had unequivocal proof that he had made the compound in question.
The reaction took place in an ultrasonic bath at full power with a magnetic stirrer bar running at full speed, with only just enough solvent present to form a slurry of the reactants, and was said only to succeed when performed in the presence of glass beads. At the time, everyone who heard this scoffed at the idea, and said that there was no way that glass beads could influence the course of a chemical reaction. But, having read the article about chemical reactions being catalysed by steel balls (15 June, p 19), I wonder if there was something in it after all.
Smallpox immunity
Your report on whether people vaccinated against smallpox decades ago still have immunity correctly states that only about 40 of 621 people still had protection. That’s 6.4 per cent of the total (1 June, p 7). But a more detailed analysis suggests that 9.4 per cent might be more accurate, as not all of the 621 had definitely had previous vaccinations.
Feedback in reverse
Feedback’s rubbishing of the County Meath car wash with a reverse osmosis filter for the rinse water as “pseudo science coinage” was a bit hasty (15 June). A reverse osmosis filter is a well-established device for water purification.
The way it works is simple. If you have two solutions of different concentrations on either side of a semipermeable membrane, then water will diffuse by osmosis from the low-concentration side to the high-concentration side to even things out. The membrane allows the solvent water molecules to pass, but not the molecules of the solute.
Conversely, if you pressurise the high-concentration side the process can be driven in reverse, and the water moves to the low-concentration side, leaving an even higher concentration solute behind. This is a reverse osmosis filter, and it can be used to separate water from all sorts of dissolved chemicals.
My family has had one on our private water supply for 20 years, where it has been removing dissolved nitrates. It also removes calcium salts, making the water softer. This is how the car-wash rinse works, leaving fewer streaks on the car after the rinse water evaporates. Clearly the writers of Irish garage forecourt signs expect customers to understand their science.
Up she goes
Has anyone really thought about the scientific and practical difficulties of the proposed firefighting airship (22 June, p 22)? Airships are kept in balance by careful ballast management. Dumping 200,000 litres of water would result in a 200,000-kilogram imbalance and the airship would rise uncontrollably. If the crew compensated for this by venting the lifting gas (helium, I suppose), then when they took on more water it would sink.
Also, airships are slow. Even travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, which is probably faster than such a large craft could achieve, it could take days to get the airship to the fire’s location. And the size and relative fragility would make them useless in turbulence, which is prevalent around fires.
Pet contraceptive
I was intrigued to read of the new male contraceptive being tested in India (8 June, page 5). What especially interests me is that, unlike hormone-based contraceptives, it should work in any species. An inexpensive, easily applied, long-term but reversible animal contraceptive would be of great interest to zoos and animal conservation programmes, and might perhaps also appeal to people who are reluctant to have their pets neutered.
Furthermore, using the procedure on animals on a large scale would give important data about the safety of the procedure, which would be of great use when regulatory bodies consider approving the procedure for humans.
New calendar
Eric Donald writes about his ingenious proposal to reform the Gregorian calendar (15 June, p 47).
I think every schoolchild wonders about the lack of logic and inconsistencies when they are taught the months of the year and the number of days in each. Reforming the calendar to make it simpler to teach is several centuries overdue.
However, if you make the calendar perpetual (days of the week remain the same from one year to the next) then you have to label 1 January “New Year’s Day” rather than any particular day of the week from Monday to Sunday, and also label 29 February “Leap Day”.
After doing this, you have to ask: “Why must the leap day be in slot 60?” It would be more appropriate to have it as 32 December.
Wet paper security
In the Patents column, you say “鈥o a 3G phone could be disabled by a computer virus” (22 June, p 21). Yes, but only if you make a really bad choice in your cellphone operating system. Computer viruses are not a natural consequence of software. They exist because certain popular commercial operating systems are about as secure as a wet paper bag.
We have a world full of insecure, virus-ridden PCs because of stupid design and financial considerations. Do we have to follow the same path again?
Robots' brains
Rodney Brooks suggests that mathematics needs some “new stuff” to breathe life into robots (1 June, p 46). Just suppose for a minute that the fundamental phenomenon underlying life itself is emergence. That is to say that “life” itself is a continual dynamic process of emergence. Such a quality could never be predicted or programmed.
That isn’t to say that robots could not discover it for themselves by accident. But the real question is: how would they recognise such emergence when they saw it? And how or why would they harness it?
Letter
Would Richard Girion explain what veganism has to do with equal rights for all? Does this mean that the solution to the problems of the Middle East, for example, is to promote a vegan lifestyle? Was the Taliban’s treatment of women due to meat consumption?
Whatever one’s views on veganism (my own are that humans are omnivorous by nature), I don’t think he does his case any favours by mixing causes.
For the record
鈥� Tetsuya Endo’s team, which found high levels of mercury in whalemeat (8 June, p 17), is based at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido in Ishikari-Tobetsu, not as reported at the University of Hokkaido, which is sited in Sapporo.
鈥� The eighth paragraph of the article on semen and depression (29 June, p 5) stated “In this this study, the never-use-condoms group were more depressed than the usually-use-condoms group.” It should have read, of course, “the always-use-condoms groups were more depressed”.
The "boffin" boffin
I was interested to note the throwaway comment in your piece on Black Magic chocolate: “Today [Nigel] Balchin is best remembered as鈥� the man who invented the terms ‘boffin’ and ‘backroom boys'” (1 June, p 50).
Actually I don’t think he is at all well remembered for it, as a request for the etymology of “boffin” which I initiated in these pages just 20 years ago (Letters, 18 March 1982, p 742) failed to elicit any useful information. So can we now be told?
Letter
Donald’s proposal is good, but hardly revolutionary: The Shire calendar, described in appendix D of my copy of The Lord of the Rings, “began on the first day of the week, Saturday, and ended on the last day of the week, Friday. The mid-year’s day, and in leap-years the Overlithe, had no weekday name.”
Letter
Why not go one stage further and add a 13th month? With 13 months each of 28 days, a Sunday could always be the 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd of every month, with the other days of the week following suit. New Year’s Eve would then be either monthless or the 29th day of the 13th month.
Of course, this calendar would consign birthdays to always being on, say, a Wednesday. Some people might object.