Dump quarks
Your article on protons shows quite clearly that the standard model, after 40 years, still has not revealed the structure of these subatomic particles (3 May, p 34).
When is science going to give up on quarks as a lost cause? In retrospect, the quark model never has had any results to recommend it. The quark has failed miserably to answer the simplest questions about the proton, such as its mass, charge or magnetic moment. Worse, the theory has had to postulate unprecedented fractional charges, and envisages proton quarks as three thingies in a bag.
Following the discovery of a third “strange” quark, someone noticed that the bagged three quarks violated the Pauli exclusion principle. Theorists got around this by postulating quark colour forces called red, blue and green that combine instantaneously to form a colourless combination.
The fact that the quark model has consistently failed has resulted in the postulation of many such crazy “patches” to shore up the theory. For example, to hold the quarks together, gluons were postulated and given the unprecedented ability to be stronger at large distances and “asymptotically” free at short distances. And to explain our failure to detect quarks, it was postulated that if you break the gluon “strings”, quarks form on the free ends.
The sad fact is that particle physicists are stuck with a very bad model, and seem content to maintain the status quo, just to feed their wives and kiddies.
Free will and crime
Are you not aware of the historical background to the debate about free will and its enormous relevance to the legal system (10 May, p 46)? Far from being a matter for insipid academic discussion, this issue has enormous significance for how we deal with crime.
If people really have no free will then it can be said they have no culpability for their actions. We can fly around in our dreams talking about this forever, but we finally hit the runway when it comes to dealing with those found guilty of certain offences: for example paedophiles, drug abusers and others whose threat to society probably arises from psychotic states over which they have minimal control.
Do we force them to take medication in addition to, or instead of, incarcerating them? We will probably end up doing some such thing, but there should be a proper debate as there are human rights implications. Our understanding of free will is a relevant issue.
We're all dreamers
Heidi Levin in her letter claims that most depressed people don’t dream (10 May, p 27) and that I was therefore wrong to claim in my interview that they dream more (12 April, p 44). She cites as support for her view her own experience of depression and that of the novelist William Styron.
Many people have the mistaken view that they dream rarely, if at all. Yet countless awakenings in sleep laboratories show that we all dream regularly, every night, even if we don’t recall our dreams when we wake in the morning. Although depressed people are less likely to report dreams, laboratory studies show that they do recall dreaming if woken during REM sleep 鈥� the type of sleep associated with intense dreaming.
These studies also show that depressed people’s first REM period of the night occurs significantly sooner, lasts longer and is more intense than for non-depressed subjects. Even though depressed people usually suffer from insomnia, the proportion of REM sleep to slow-wave sleep, especially the energy-restoring stage 4 slow-wave sleep, is dramatically increased, which is why they wake up with an exhausted brain.
My research indicates that what is creating the pressure on the REM sleep mechanism is excessive emotionally arousing thinking during the daytime.
Kick-starting life
The explanation that an asteroid started the evolution of multicellular life 580 million years ago instead of an extreme ice age looks to me, if not wrong, at least useless (3 May, p 17)
Surely tens of asteroids as big as the Lake Acraman one, or even bigger, struck Earth in the billions of years preceding that particular impact, but in all the other cases life continued its quiet unicellular evolution. So to think that the Lake Acraman asteroid started the evolution of multicellular life simply shifts the problem.
Instead of asking “Why did multicellular life start to evolve around 500 million years ago?” we should ask: “What particular conditions were there on Earth 580 million years ago that allowed the Lake Acraman asteroid to start the evolution of multicellular life?”
DU decay products
In his letter about depleted uranium, Clive Semmens writes of protactinium-234m (Pa-234m), the decay product of thorium-234, (10 May, p 26, and see “For the record”, 24 May, p 27).
Enhanced levels of both Th-234 and Pa-234m have been detected in soil samples from conflict zones and act as a convenient tracer for uranium as they can be quickly and easily measured by gamma spectrometry. In the UK, Th-234 and Pa-234m are significant pollutants in the Ribble estuary. They are waste products from uranium refining, where they contribute to the enhanced beta dose rates seen in users of the estuary.
People's internet
You claim that global capitalism made the internet possible (3 May, p 46).
The World Wide Web was invented by a researcher at CERN, while the internet over which it runs was funded and set up by the US government. Much of the software on which internet sites are run, such as Linux, Apache or Netscape, has been developed outside the commercial sector. A significant proportion of the remaining software (Internet Explorer, Internet Information Server and so on) is provided free of charge.
Global capitalism’s most noticeable contributions to the internet so far have been a handful of mail-order businesses, a plethora of failed ones and a lasting legacy of porn sites and junk emails.
But thanks to universities, bloggers, free content from traditional media providers published online at a loss and countless millions of enthusiasts’ websites, most of the internet remains blissfully free of profit.
No doubt this will change with time, at which point it will be interesting to see to what extent it is still possible to use the internet as an effective tool to research alternative media sources.
Biobank limits
Your timely full-page article on the British Biobank summarises the position well (10 May, p 25). But it omitted to mention the commanding advantage that Biobank has over many other studies: blood plasma will be analysed and banked. Unlike DNA, this usually changes when people experience common disorders, acting as a signpost to suspicious segments of the genome. Without such a helping hand, influential genes would be prohibitively expensive to locate.
However, the major health problems of children, young adults, pregnancy and birth are excluded from Biobank 鈥� only the over-45s feature. Childhood asthma and diabetes are almost doubling each generation. Birth provides an ideal opportunity for projects like Biobank. Blood taken during pregnancy is usually referred to a blood bank and at birth the cord and placenta provide blood and unlimited DNA from the child.
There is an urgent need to initiate such complementary and relatively cheap studies, or to supplement those already established for adult disorders. Meanwhile, now that the decision has been made, Biobank and its recently appointed director deserve every support.
Letter
I was surprised that the Biobank’s sponsors seem to have set their sights so low.
Two decades ago, perhaps, 69 would have seemed a fair age at which to stop collecting data. Nowadays, people of that age cannot be described as elderly, and life expectancy stretches far beyond that. Until people on the register start dying off, the most valuable data will not start coming in. So data from some much older people also needs to be included.
My own father died in 1987 aged 101. My mother died at only 68, but her father, aunt and uncle lived to be 84, 96 and 100, dying between 1927 and 1950. In those days, that was old.
Given my forebears’ longevity, I will be unlucky not to live another 20 years yet 鈥� I’m still only 78. Biobank should think again on that one if it doesn’t want to wait forever for its data.
Glow of giving
I was intrigued by your article associating the hormone oxytocin with trustworthiness (10 May, p 32). As a professional fundraiser I couldn’t help wondering whether the experiments reported reveal a mechanism for altruism rather than trust.
In the game you describe, Player 1 gambles some of her stake by giving it to Player 2, for whom it is tripled. If Player 2 then reciprocates by giving money back to Player 1, his oxytocin levels rise. Surely what we are seeing here is a link between hormonal activity and the simple pleasure of giving, for which there is no rational reward 鈥� in other words, altruism.
This suggests the need for two further experiments. First, when the trust game is played, why not ask participants at the end of the game to donate a share of their stake to charity? Would this reveal a correlation between oxytocin and giving?
Second, any fundraiser will tell you that there are some people who are “serial charity givers”, irrespective of their personal wealth. Why not compare their oxytocin levels with a control group? Are committed philanthropists simply people with raised hormone levels?
A basic tenet of fundraising is that people give not out of guilt, but to enjoy a “rosy glow”. Perhaps giving also gives us the same feelings as “warm baths, gentle vibration and sex” (as reported in your article)? In which case giving is truly its own reward.
Tense railways
I don’t want to nit-pick, but continuously welded railway tracks are normally under tension, not compression (3 May, p 20). Rails are set to be at zero tension at the upper end of the usual temperature range, by heating or by mechanically tensioning.
Top of the tablet
I suppose I ought not to be surprised any more that newspapers and magazines in general know so little about Ancient Iraq, but it still disappoints me when they 鈥� frequently 鈥� publish photographs of cuneiform tablets upside down (10 May, p 8).
There is a simple scientific method for recognising which is the top and which is the bottom of a tablet. Cuneiform signs are made up of lines and triangles. No apex of a triangle is ever at the top of a sign because to achieve that the poor scribe would have to hold his stylus upside down.
Alien technology
You state that the war in Iraq was actually fought over alien technology from a crashed UFO, as reported by the New Zealand website Stuff (Feedback, 3 May).
I was interested to note that the URL of Stuff’s report requires 18 digits and a letter to specify this story. Does this imply the Stuff website is designed to carry a maximum number of 26 脳 1018 stories (if the digits may be replaced by any digit and the letter replaced by any letter) or even 3619 stories (if the digits and letter may be replaced by any digit or letter)?
Given a conservative estimate that each story would take up 1 kilobyte of memory, this would imply that the web server has 3.7 脳 1029 bytes of memory, equal to 314 million yottabytes or (according to one proposed system) 300 wekabytes of memory.
Does this suggest that the operators of the Stuff website are already in possession of alien technology beyond anything Saddam Hussein had? I think we should be told.