For the record
鈥� The radon sensor mentioned in our article about looking for water on Mars (26 July, p 18) weighs a few tens of grams, not a few tenths.
鈥� Because of an error in a photo agency caption, the photograph of a creature illustrating a feature on evolution was described as a sea squirt (2 August, p 34). It is in fact a sea anemone.
Life from space
Chandra Wickramasinghe (2 August, p 22) states that panspermia “鈥emains a major contender amongst theories of the origins of life”. It is certainly not a major contender 鈥� it may suggest a mechanism by which life arrived on our planet but it merely pushes any actual explanation of the origins of that life off-planet. Panspermia does not explain how the microbes and bacteria he mentions came about in the first place.
Antibiotic fashions
I read with interest your articles about superbugs and antibiotics (Inside Science, 19 July). In the 1990s we had the suggestion that people with congestive heart failure should be given antibiotics because of links between the condition and particular bacterial infections. Some who had received antibiotic treatment showed an improvement. It did strike me that such an approach, if applied to the wider population, may be in direct contrast to the guidance given to family doctors to prescribe antibiotics sparingly.
Food from oil
In your Energy Special you say we have three main uses for oil: electricity production, heating and transport (2 August, p 8). There is a fourth item that could turn out to be even more important 鈥� food.
The end of cheap oil is going to mean the end of cheap food, and this will have the greatest impact on the agriculture of those parts of the world that have abandoned the use of human and animal muscle power.
Famine is not a word that is mentioned much in connection with the UK. But the Blair government seems to think that agriculture can be abandoned like any other industry that doesn’t show a profit without any danger of shortages. But I still have a memento of my childhood: my second world war ration book.
Faster than light?
A muon travelling at nearly the velocity of light (30 centimetres per nanosecond) is bound to take rather more than 3 nanoseconds to traverse a 1-metre chamber (26 July, p 34). No way can it take “鈥ess than a nanosecond to go across the detector”.
The editor writes:
John Ponsonby is correct. Some readers have also expressed confusion about the lifespan of muons. This arose from our failure to make it clear that, although muons generally live for around a millionth of a second as measured in the lab, if they are travelling close to the speed of light, relativistic time dilation kicks in. This means that, from the muons’ point of view, their lifetime is effectively extended at such speeds. And so a muon moving with a speed close to the speed of light can travel further than we would ordinarily expect.
Nothing ventured鈥�
Glenn Crocker’s article makes an interesting point about the future of biotechnology-based companies and the involvement of venture capitalists (19 July, p 52). Venture capitalists usually only get involved in the later stages of company development, but their input in biotech start-ups would be very beneficial.
However, there is a major stumbling block: the academic who started the company would have to relinquish control at an earlier stage. But one only needs to look across the Atlantic to appreciate what can be achieved.
Writing wrongs
Anton Fjortoft wrote that the modern Hebrew alphabet was virtually invented by a Jewish professor around 1948 (26 July, p 25). I don’t know which professor he is referring to, but the Hebrew alphabet used today is the same as that used for thousands of years. Styles have changed a bit, but the main difference between the modern alphabet and the old Hebrew alphabet dates from the Babylonian captivity (several centuries before Christ), when the Jews adopted the Babylonian Aramaic script. The newer alphabet has several letters that resemble each other and have therefore led to copying mistakes in the Bible. In the old alphabet, all the letters were quite distinct.
Romeo and 11 Juliets
We too have noticed that macho males do not always win in the mating game (2 August, p 16). The most popular roosters at our sanctuary are never the biggest or most aggressive but tend instead to be the most gentle and self-sacrificing.
One rooster, who we called Romeo long before his popularity with hens became evident, always had between 7 and 11 hens around him even though he was shy, retiring and not particularly fit. Like most “broiler” chickens bred to have excessively large breast and thigh muscles regardless of the impact on their welfare, Romeo had a host of heath problems that led to an early death. Yet, while he was alive, he was preferred over stronger, healthier and more assertive birds. Why? He deferred to the hens, sang to them at night, and never forced himself on them. Apparently, he was good company.
Intelligence blind spot
The news that the CIA is worried about a December attack from the Ebenezer Scrooge group (Feedback, 26 July) reminds me of an incident when I was working for a US government laboratory. I was hauled up in front of the security department because I had allegedly left a classified document on my desk overnight.
The document in question was entitled Project Turnabout, classified “Ultra Secret”, and consisted of a detailed description of a proposed system for the defence of the US against a Russian missile attack.
The idea was that a very large number of Atlas rocket engines should be placed round the equator, half facing north in one hemisphere and the other half facing south in the other hemisphere. When a Russian launch was detected by the early-warning system in Colorado Springs the engines would be fired, spinning Earth round so that the missiles would land back in Russia.
Security people are not well supplied with a sense of humour and the only reason that I escaped condign punishment was on a technicality: there is no Ultra Secret classification.
Working up a sweat
Athletes cannot rehydrate completely because they lose too much salt in their sweat (26 July, p 22). Animals that do not sweat, such as dogs, sheep and camels, rehydrate with astonishing precision. And people with salt-deficient diets are able to reduce sodium losses from the body to vanishing point. The high salt intake in western diets means that westerners tend to have salty sweat, even when, as athletes, they need to conserve salt.
If an athlete trains on a low-salt diet, little salt is lost in the sweat. The desire to drink then becomes an accurate guide to the volume of rehydration water needed. There would be no need to tell athletes to drink as much as possible, and no danger of the overzealous causing themselves harm.
Letter
Your reporters Andy Coghlan and Nicola Jones state that there is no evidence that virus-derived genes in GM crops would recombine with genes in an infecting virus (26 July, p 6). But it cannot be ruled out. Several dozen papers published in major refereed journals, such as Science, over the past decade have reported the opposite. Please put the public record straight.
Nicola Jones writes:
The British government’s GM Science Review states that no transfer of genetic material from GM plants to viruses has been seen under field conditions. The report says that a transfer can be made to happen in the lab under specific conditions, but that this “remains a hypothetical situation in the field”.
Letter
The former British environment minister Michael Meacher is right to say that “what people want to know is鈥hether it [GM food] is inherently completely safe” (2 August, p 21). And as we all know, this has not yet been proven. In the meantime the GM battleground is being, and probably will be, won by PR people rather than sound science.
Already restaurants and retail food outlets in the UK are promoting their premises as “GM-free zones” in response to a growing public perception that GM means unhealthy and adulterated food. So Meacher needn’t worry too much, because the “GM democracy” he speaks of is in full swing and the public are making up their own minds.
Coming up for air
I read with great interest your article about bedwetting. As someone who has been treating patients with numerous medical problems through dentistry for many years I find it very disturbing that bedwetting has been shown to be reduced by expanding the palate to increase the airway.
Simple arch expansion, without taking into account other asymmetries around the head, face and jaws will make existing asymmetries 鈥� and consequentially the medical problems 鈥� much worse. For patients this will be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Bedwetting is only a small aspect of the problems encountered by these patients. The answers to this and a host of other ailments are not as simple as depicted in your article.
Sweet digestion
So the British government’s chief scientist David King believes there is no evidence that it is harmful to eat genetically modified crops, and that to rule out the experience of some 250 million people, mainly in the US, who have eaten GM food for 7 years without any sign of ill effects would be “foolhardy” (26 July, p 6)?
A book just out 鈥� Fat Land: How Americans became the fattest people in the world by Greg Critser 鈥� reports that high-fructose corn syrup, first introduced in 1971 and used massively in the US as a substitute for expensive imported cane sugar, has just been found to skip most of the digestive processes and arrive at the liver more or less intact. As a result, 60 million Americans now suffer from a new kind of diabetes. This syrup contributes up to a fifth of the calories in the diets of American children (1 September 2001, p 26). As the high-fructose corn syrup saga shows, we may have to wait decades before we can know whether any GM food product is also harmful to health.