World of science
Being a molecular biologist interested in the ethical issues raised by the swift changes in my field, I found your article on making killer viruses interesting (20 July, p 6). However, I was disappointed to read about a company that ships DNA “to more than 40 countries around the world, including some in the Middle East”.
The wording made it sound like genuine science was only pursued in Western countries, whereas Middle Eastern countries were interested in it for other purposes.
Availability of scientific information and services to scientists and others, regardless of geographical or racial borders, is also an ethical issue.
Win, win situation
Your article states that “girls get competitive, but only if it’s worth it” (24 August, p 21).
Surely, nature would never create a social behaviour that is “stupid”, as your piece suggests competitive males are. Winning improves the winners’ psychological characteristics, thus increasing their advantage. The gain in social status and mental confidence could itself justify participation in a competition which has no immediate gains.
Girls don’t compete as much simply because in most mammalian species, it is the poor males’ role to compete for a mate, while the females simply choose the winner.
Letter
There is another facet to competition that should have been included in the experiment: a game where cooperation pays off. The way this experiment is structured suggests that only competition can produce benefits, and that cooperation is, at best, neutral.
Do the researchers plan a set of follow-up experiments, comparing a situation where cooperation leads to benefits with one where competition has, at best, neutral results?
Elegant algorithm
I disagree with Nicola Dixon’s claim that “Experts had suspected a polynomial-time algorithm was possible” (17 August, p 9).
The general feeling was that such an algorithm does not exist. “Heavy artillery” has been used to obtain only tiny reductions in the complexity of factoring algorithms.
I admire not only the beautiful simplicity of the Agrawal-Kayal-Saxtena solution, but the courage they showed in searching for it. Factoring, a close relative of primality, is also believed to be intractable and a significant amount of current encryption is based on this assumption. Perhaps we have been wrong again.
Where's the coal?
In Jeff Hecht’s piece on getting oil from rock, J. F. Kenney’s claim that all petroleum has to be formed at great depth hits a major stumbling block. It’s to do with the origin of coal (17 August, p 17).
Coal and oil form under identical pressures and temperatures, and via very similar chemical processes. Essentially, the only differences are the nature of the source material (blatantly organic, in the case of coal) and the physical state of the end product.
The petroleum industry uses the presence of coal in sediment as an indicator of conditions that might also have led to the formation of oil and gas. Coal itself is commonly gassy and can contain traces of liquid, or “heavy”, petroleum.
To the best of my knowledge there is no evidence to suggest that coal deposits ever reached a depth of 100 kilometres during their formation.
Raven brains
I enjoyed your article on the tool-wielding New Caledonian crows, and wondered whether any similar research has been done on the Tasmanian forest raven, Corvus tasmanicus (17 August, p 44).
These birds also display creative intelligence: they “know” that vehicles travel on one side only of a central white line on country roads. When they feast on road kill, they only need to take a leisurely hop or two to get to the other side of the line, where they wait safely for the vehicle to go by. The only occasions on which they stir themselves into taking flight are when vehicles are approaching from both directions.
These birds also know that food can often be liberated from unattended backpacks and are expert at opening any zippers left unsecured by unwary bushwalkers. I would not be surprised to find these birds using tools like their New Caledonian cousins.
For the record
鈥� We understated the death rate from illness in the text box entitled “In-flight emergencies” (31 August, p 11). A death rate from illness of one death per 2.4 to 7.5 billion passenger kilometres corresponds to an annual death toll of between 440 and 1380.
鈥� In “Fires from hell”, we wrote that the annual consumption of coal in underground fires in China is around 100 million tonnes (31 August, p 34). This is less than the 1 billion tonnes that China burns deliberately, not more as we stated.
Letter
The article states that the meteorologists don’t know why the cyclones that produced the heavy rainfall are tracking south of their usual path. But as I understand it, El Ni帽o, which is occurring this year, is thought to cause this effect in the northern hemisphere.
El Ni帽os are occurring more frequently and are more dramatic. Some researchers think this is due to global warming, so is this the link people are looking for?
Profit and principle
I feel that Rino Rappuoli, who wrote on why we should pay more for drugs, has rather missed the point (31 August, p 25). Private companies are there to make a profit and not to look after a country’s population. That is why we have governments.
This article seems to provide a very good case for why research should be done within the public sector. When a suitable vaccine is discovered, it could then be licensed out to several drugs companies, thus creating more competition and enabling the medicine to be sold at a lower price. The government would be able to decide which areas were most important and at the same time recoup some of the costs via the licensing agreements.
Forecasting flaws
John Casti’s article on Elliott wave theory missed out the downside of this type of financial forecasting (31 August, p 28). Like economists, any two “Elliotticians” will have great difficulty in agreeing about what has happened in the past. Failures and extensions of waves bedevil even experts like Robert Prechter, who got the strong financial uptrend of the 1990s badly wrong.
A point that was not mentioned is that Elliott wave theory is good at forecasting how far markets descend. The rule of thumb mentioned means the Dow Jones is forecast to fall to somewhere between 2400 and 1500, based on your displayed count. There goes the pension!
Letter
It is easy to take past data from stock markets and find models (such as power laws) that fit this data. This has been done since the 1960s. What is much harder is finding any predictive content in such models. The financial economics community, which I deal with on a day-to-day basis, has attempted to test claims of prediction statistically, without success.
The unfortunate truth about many “chartists” is that they have a financial interest in marketing their predictions to people ignorant of statistical inference.
It is ironic that Prechter claims that his declining popularity somehow proves his theory. In fact, it demonstrates the opposite: investors are failing to make money out of his ideas.
Letter
Does Casti’s article really deserve a place in New 杏吧原创? I read it with interest, expecting to find details of some genuine scientific research that supports the theory. However, the only source material seems to be the work of Prechter.
Most critics of Prechter’s ideas would point out that it’s just as easy to find patterns in the stock market that contradict the theory as it is to find patterns that support it. Elliott wave theory has been around for a while. There is nothing new or scientific about it.
Grass equals happiness
So researchers are finding a link between a lack of omega-3 fatty acids in the modern human diet and the growing epidemic of depression (24 August, p 34)?
Work at Bristol University, the Welsh Institute of Rural Studies and the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Aberystwyth has found that grass-fed animals have higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than intensively reared grain-fed animals. I believe the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition recently came to the same conclusion.
The Scottish Agricultural College has found higher levels of the essential unsaturated fatty acids known as CLAs (conjugated linoleic acids) in grazing animals than in animals fed on silage, or even on grass cut and taken to them.
In 1999 I read in the press that battery hens fed on standard poultry feeds laid eggs devoid of omega-3, and the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 was lower in farmed salmon than in wild.
My conclusion? The intensive farming of livestock that became widespread in the 20th century may be the cause of mental illness and misery for many millions of people across the world and may be a huge hidden cost for health services, social services and economies.
Reframe the question
I am at a loss to understand Tam Dalyell’s preference for keeping to existing mechanisms of public dialogue around difficult or contentious issues (7 September, p 57).
It is no longer good enough for the government to make proposals and simply consult people, even if such consultation is conducted using approaches that are bang up to date. It is still consultation, and this is a problem because a small, exclusive group has to develop the proposal which people are to be consulted about. The result is that interested parties are then confronted with closed questions requiring only yes or no/for or against answers. Any subsequent debate becomes polarised and conflict-bound.
The way the science is done can exacerbate such conflicts. If one side produces science in favour of its view, the other side traditionally attacks either the provenance of the work (who did it and who paid) and/or the methodology. Classic cases in point are the potential relationship between the MMR triple vaccine and autism, and the studies that informed the controversial British policy for “contiguous” culling of healthy farm animals during the foot and mouth epidemic. The argument is simply contracted out to conflicting camps of experts, with little hope of resolution.
Parties with an interest in an issue respond much more effectively and willingly to open questions: “What should we do about nuclear waste?” or “How should we address growing aeroplane congestion in the south-east of England?” Few if any of the existing mechanisms preferred by Dalyell seem to permit this.
A whole range of difficult issues can be resolved if those in government realise that part of the problem is an inability to frame the right questions. The answer is to encourage those with an interest to jointly commission the science and determine how all parties can work together to provide workable answers.
Warmed-up thinking
I read continually about global warming being linked to virtually every significant weather event that occurs these days. A prime example comes from your article on the European floods, where you talk of “fresh evidence linking the floods to global warming” (24 August, p 4).
As any global warming expert would tell you, all models and data suggest that if significant warming does occur (to date, it has been far below levels predicted by models), then increased precipitation will occur during the winter months only. Quite the opposite is suggested for Europe and the US during summer.
So either your article is correct and the climate model predictions are called severely into question, or you are motivated by an ideological agenda that seeks to insert global warming into any extraordinary weather event in such a way as to exaggerate the threat and promote the agenda of global warming, regardless of data and modelling.