Chernobyl deaths
Your article on nuclear power is authoritative and worthwhile, but I wish to take issue with same comments on the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident (Inside Science 157, 18 January).
You state that: “More than 9000 extra deaths from cancer have since been recorded in the local population.” To the best of my knowledge this is not the case. Probably the most authoritative source of information on the health effects is the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report, which was presented to the UN General Assembly on 6 June 2000.
The press release states: “There have been about 1800 cases of thyroid cancer in children who were exposed at the time of the accident, and if the current trend continues there may be more cases during the next decades. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 14 years after the accident.
“There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality or in non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The risk of leukaemia, one of the main concerns owing to its short latency time, does not appear to be elevated, not even among the recovery workers.”
It is also worth noting that, despite common perception, there has been no increase in birth defects 鈥� and such cases were also not observed amongst the Japanese atomic bomb survivors who have also been extensively studied by UNSCEAR.
I predict that when the oil runs out there is likely to be a resurgence in the use of nuclear power, as there are few alternatives. Renewable sources are welcome, but they will not supply the bulk of our electricity needs. It is therefore important to understand the true consequences of this major accident.
SUV 'safety'
I was glad to see Anil Ananthaswamy’s article on the dangers of sports utility vehicle pose for their occupants and for other road users (8 March, p 12). But I believe one factor has been overlooked in the quest for safer vehicles: perceived safety.
There is evidence that drivers who perceive themselves as being safer鈥攁n illusion that SUVs promote鈥攁ctually drive more riskily. This means that any solution to road safety depending solely on engineering is likely to fail or, at best, transfer the risk to other road users. What is required is more attention to the psychology of “the nut behind the wheel”.
Ban HTML emails
The Bayesian approach to detecting spam is interesting, but there is a simpler method for getting rid of the majority of junk email (8 March, p 42). Most spammers cannot resist the lure of “presentation”. That is, they want colour, fancy fonts, and so on. Most genuine emails are intended to convey basic facts and queries, and dressing them up is nugatory. Plain text is sufficient in most cases.
Most genuine messages sent as HTML arise simply because the sender does not know how to use Outlook Express properly or other mail clients which are capable of sending messages in HTML. Of course, if presentation is essential, then an attachment or website link can be used.
By notifying friends and colleagues that all HTML emails will automatically be deleted via the commonly available “rules” option, it is possible to reduce the volume of spam very considerably, to say nothing of eliminating any malicious scripts.
The place for HTML is the Web, and only the Web. Ban HTML emails, I say.
Letter
Bruce Schechter’s report neglects one important point. To apply Bayesian filters one must first accept the entire spam message. Given the ever-increasing size of spams as the senders resort to HTML formatting and other tricks, this places an ever-increasing burden, in terms of bandwidth and disc space, on ISP mail servers. Blocking all emails from open relays 鈥� or blacklisting, which is compared to terrorism in your article鈥攄oes not suffer this problem.
World TB day
The development of a new treatment for tuberculosis is good news indeed (1 March, p 24). Around 2 million people die each year as a result of TB, and it is known to be a major cause of death in people with HIV/AIDS. Countless others live in poverty and suffering as a further effect of TB.
A global plan to combat TB has been agreed, backed up by the Global TB Drug Facility and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. But the key problem is lack of resources. Conventional treatment for TB costs around $10鈥攜et shamefully, less than one-third of people who need this treatment can afford it.
To effectively combat TB, treatments need to remain affordable, and governments in developed nations need to significantly improve their contribution to the Global Fund.
Monday 24 March has been designated World TB day, commemorating the date of the discovery of the TB bacterium. Can we look forward on this anniversary to achieving the real commitment needed to properly resource the fight against this killer disease?
Whistling in the wind
There is an obvious flaw in the British government’s arguments set out in the new energy White Paper (1 March, p 12). Investment in wind power does not reduce the need for conventional power supplies in any way, shape or form, because we will always need back-up when it is not windy.
Thus the costs of building wind farms need to be doubled, as a megawatt of back-up power needs to be commissioned for every megawatt of wind power鈥攁 duplication that makes a mockery of the government’s latest proposals.
Just count the atoms
Having read your very interesting article on the problems of creating a standard kilogram, I was left with a sense of “What’s the problem?” (22 February, p 32).
If we go back to the definition of a mole we are told that it is the amount of a substance that contains as many elementary entities (molecules) as there are atoms in 0.012 kilograms of carbon-12.
If we know the number of atoms in 0.012 kilograms of carbon-12 is it not simply a case of multiplication to get the number of atoms in 1 kilogram of carbon-12?
Boom for biofuels
Your news item on jojoba bio-diesel lacked proper context (8 March, p 18). The carbon content of bio-diesel is barely different from that of mineral diesel fuel. The compelling reason for using it is substantially lower carbon emissions over its life cycle.
Older readers will recall that New 杏吧原创 was running features on bio-diesel as long ago as 1979, and since then just about every vegetable oil has been tested, either neat or as an alkyl ester. The advantages you report for jojoba bio-diesel are more or less the same as for all vegetable oil esters鈥攁nd the esters are made not with “a dash” of methanol, but about 20 per cent by weight.
What was most exciting to me is that the engineering trials were carried out by a team of Middle Eastern scientists, showing that interest in alternative fuels now extends to traditionally conservative oil-exporting Arab states, whose governments are notorious for their opposition to the Kyoto Protocol.
Bio-diesel is now close to a real breakthrough in British and European markets, due to widespread dissemination of the (simple) processing technology and price incentives such as the 20 pence per litre tax break introduced in the last British Budget. It may not be the “greenest” of all possible alternative fuels, but it can plug an important gap in renewable energy policy in the short term, as a direct substitute for petroleum fuels.
Neglected invention
It was heartbreaking to read the article about Hans-Peter Salzmann by Laura Spinney (22 February, p 36). It is sad to see that enabling technology is still very much in the Stone Age, when it could offer so much to enrich so many people’s lives.
I’ve been involved in the design of communication devices like this for nearly 20 years, producing one called Private Eye. I’d sunk every cent I had into the project, and despite the huge interest from possible users and provisional orders for several units, I couldn’t raise any more money to move to production.
Unfortunately a spinal injury in 2000 has left me with so little creative time that I can no longer afford to spend it on projects that don’t produce income. It was always my dream to produce designs that helped at the individual level. I hope one day to be able to return to that.
Grafting bananas
The reason why bananas cannot be grafted, as suggested by Anthony Whyte (15 February, p 24), can be found in the Royal Horticultural Society’s new book, Science in the Garden: the scientific basis of horticultural practice (Blackwell Publishing, 拢19.99).
For a graft to unite, the root stock and the piece of shoot to be attached to it must both possess cambial tissue, a thin layer of cells inside the vascular bundles that divide to create a successful union. Monocotyledonous plants (bananas, palm trees, lilies, grasses and so on) do not possess a cambium, however, and grafts are therefore very difficult to achieve.
If successful, the two cut surfaces must be held permanently together by tying or taping, which in all likelihood would further increase the chance of disease.
Illegal dots
After your review published last autumn of Jessica Helfand’s excellent book on wheel charts, I started collecting them (28 September, p 53).
On both French and German eBay (I am British, live in Germany and work in France鈥攄on’t ask!), when I tried to buy from American sellers one of several Boy Scout semaphore and signalling disks, dating from around 1914, up popped a screen telling me that for security or other reasons, the sale was prohibited to certain other countries.
So I wonder: is the problem the Boy Scouts, or the semaphore? Or perhaps the Iraqi equivalent of Boy Scouts have undeclared semaphore flags and illegally imported supplies of dots and dashes?
For the record
鈥� On 1 March we printed the article “How to steal a PIN in just 15 attempts” (p 7). We now accept that we characterised Citibank’s involvement in the court case inaccurately. Citibank and its associate company, Diners Club International Limited, are not involved in the case other than as witnesses and there is no evidence that demonstrates that any system operated by those companies is insecure.
鈥� The sea urchin larva pictured on p 20 of the 1 March issue was described as Echinoid echinopluteus, based on the caption supplied by the picture agency. In fact, as reader Gerald Legg pointed out, there is no such species.
鈥� In our article on SUVs (8 March, p 12), we incorrectly stated that incentives under President George Bush’s new tax plan would allow small business owners to acquire SUVs for free. In fact, the Bush tax plan would allow small businesses to deduct the cost of buying large SUVs against their taxes, up to maximum of $75,000. This would still lead to substantial savings. For instance, under the tax plan, someone buying a Hummer H1 at a cost of $102,581 could save about $33,000.
鈥� In our feature on wildlife conservation (1 March, p 32), we should have said that it is The Wildlife Foundation not the African Wildlife Foundation that is running the project with local people around Nairobi National Park. We also misspelled Jeffrey McNeely’s name in the “What the experts say” box.