Robots in demand
I was interested to read your report on the recent UNECE research on industrial and domestic robots (1 November, p 23), and gratified to see the Electrolux Trilobite included.
However, your article suggests that Trilobite has not been a successful product for us. This is far from being the case: we consider the Trilobite to be a hit for the group and the product is currently on sale in more than 25 countries around the world.
Table manners
A wearable mobile phone that turns your finger into an earpiece? Picture this: you are in a restaurant, when your partner’s wristband rings. Imagine your surprise when your companion suddenly thrusts an index finger into your ear with the announcement: “It’s for you.”
Avoiding false positives
I was interested and encouraged to read about the innovative scheme in the UK to routinely screen nutritional supplements for substances that might cause athletes taking them in good faith to fail dope tests (1 November, p 8). Your readers might be interested to know that a similar scheme began operating earlier this year in Australia, through cooperation between the Australian Sports Drug Agency, the Australian Institute of Sport and the Australian Government Analytical Laboratories.
Supplement manufacturers can have their products independently analysed and listed online by the agency at . The site offers athletes far more information about supplement products than was available before.
Realm of fantasy
How many Disneylands equal one Wales, Feedback wonders (8 November). You might well ask. The standard unit of measurement in Europe is the Belgium 鈥� 30,510 square kilometres 鈥� typically used to describe areas of deforestation. It is “about the same as Maryland”. Disneyland, however, is an entirely different problem, since it is mostly based on fictional places and characters, so its area must be described using imaginary numbers. This makes it a useful measurement to describe other, largely imaginary objects.
Letter
The proper units for large areas, such as those of giant icebergs and hurricanes, are the Wales (metric) and the Delaware (imperial). The conversion rate is approximately 3.215 Delawares to the Wales. The Disneyland is strictly a regional unit, and is not recognised by any international standards organisation. Measurement of height is, of course, in Eiffeltowers and Empirestatebuildings (1.368 Eiffeltowers to the Empirestatebuilding).
Letter
The apparent link between long-lived animals and high levels of saturated fat in membranes reminded me of an article in Science 10 to 15 years ago subtitled “The older you grow, the more you glow”. When fluorescent lipid peroxidation products in membranes were assessed in rats as they aged, more damage was seen in rats fed on a diet high in unsaturated fat than in those fed more saturated fats.
This and other evidence convinced us that we should eat more saturated fats than currently recommended. So we do not trim meat, we enjoy butter and cream, and balance these with the more unsaturated fats and antioxidant vegetables as we enjoy retired life in low-stress Cornwall. You are what you eat!
Planes and automobiles
Your article about the adoption of drive-by-wire technology in cars (8 November, p 28) covered an important range of issues, but missed one vital point: aircraft are maintained to the highest of standards according to strictly enforced rules; cars are not. What will happen to second or third-hand drive-by-wire cars that are not properly maintained or repaired, and how will this affect the safety of all road users? Or is this part of a plan to force motorists to regularly attend only the manufacturer’s approved (and no doubt expensive) garages?
Stampeding voles
I am pleased to hear that the Smart Laser Dazzler will not cause permanent damage (15 November, p 24). But if, as the article suggests, it is an automatic system, then anyone nearby should be wary of being stampeded, bitten and pecked to death by startled and enraged wildlife as the system blithely picks off every deer, bear, vole, owl, bat, etc in the vicinity.
I can’t see the system doing too much for the element of surprise. You’d just need to locate the cacophony of disgruntled fauna to work out where the laser is.
Eat well, live long?
Douglas Fox reported on the impact of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) on metabolic rates (1 November, p 42). After concluding that “membranes crammed full of PUFA set us free to hot-rod down the metabolic highway of life”, he warned that “PUFA also exact a horrible price: the more of them our membranes contain, the shorter our life”.
The correctness of this statement is debatable if applied to a particular species. For humans just the opposite appears to be correct: high content of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22:6n3), the most common PUFA of the human body, may prevent disease and could prolong life. For example, the longevity of the Japanese has been linked to their diet. They have one of the highest DHA concentrations in their membranes thanks to their high level of fish consumption. The Inuit did not know heart disease before they were introduced to western diet habits that reduced their fish intake. There is a correlation between heart disease, autoimmune disorders, eye disease, neurological disorders and low DHA content of tissue.
Scientific evidence that high levels of DHA are equivalent to oxidative damage is shaky. While it is true that beyond a certain level of oxidative damage polyunsaturated membranes are destroyed in an autocatalytic process, there is evidence that polyunsaturated membranes may reduce oxidative damage to vital proteins by catching harmful free radicals. The body has well-designed repair mechanisms to remove those oxidised polyunsaturated chains. High levels of PUFA appear to be damaging only when the repair mechanisms are overwhelmed.
Worthy precedent
The report by the Working Group on Human Remains is not simply giving a nod to non-western concepts of ancestry when it advocates broader consultation with indigenous groups over the return of human remains (15 November, p 9).
By 2018, hundreds of thousands of graves from the killing fields of the Great War will be over a century old. Nevertheless, can you imagine the response if the French government were to unilaterally authorise the mass exhumation of Commonwealth war graves as part of a legitimate and important medical research programme?
Over the past two centuries, the indigenous people of Australia have lost everything: their land has been taken from them, their populations have been decimated, their culture has been gutted, their children have been systematically abducted by their own governments. Most of the remains of modern Aboriginal people currently in British collections were taken in circumstances that would not now be tolerated by any civilised culture. The fact that so many members of the British scientific community are prepared to give precedence to emotional and cultural concerns over research shows great maturity and generosity, particularly when our national government here in Australia steadfastly refuses even to make a simple apology to its indigenous citizens for our terrible past.
Letter
I couldn’t help feeling, as I read this article, that the US must be laying itself open for a visit from Iraq’s weapons inspectors if it is producing substances like this.
More to life
As if the universe wasn’t mind-numbingly huge enough, Leonard Susskind suggests there might be 10500 further universes (1 November, p 35). This interpretation of string theory is supposed to get us off the hook of the strong anthropic principle. Yet isn’t this deeply ironic, not to mention inelegant?
The extraordinary hypothesis seems to be based on no other evidence than the fact that we exist, and the notion that we would be more comfortable about the odds of our existence if there were a large number of trial universes from which ours was randomly picked. If we cannot work out in an elegant way why physics should lead to our existence, we now have our existence leading a new metaphysics.
Perhaps its inescapability will prove to be the weirdest thing about the anthropic principle.
Read the manual
Eric Kvaalen might have scared a few more people than he needed to (Letters, 8 November, p 32). Saying that condoms only work “85 per cent of the time” isn’t very informative without saying what is meant by “time”. If they failed to prevent pregnancy on 15 per cent of the occasions on which they were used, they would be pretty well useless as contraceptives. In fact, in typical use they fail in about 15 per cent of woman-years. In other words, a woman runs about a 15 per cent risk of becoming pregnant in a year in which she and her partner use condoms “typically”. If condoms are used correctly (which simply means following the instructions on the packet) that value falls to about 3 per cent.
Conservative values
George W. Bush doesn’t like fetal stem cell research, which many people believe will alleviate suffering and save lives although it upsets those “conservative” voters who salivate and bark at the word “fetus”. Yet the US government is busily developing lethal varieties of mousepox and other pathogens (1 November, p 6). One is forced to conclude that conservative bioethics favour killing people, but not until after they’re born.
Monkeys are different
Your “Insider”report on neuroscience, and in particular the column entitled “In demand”, suggests that excellence in neuroscience research is based almost entirely on animal research (1 November, p 53). This is not the case, and if Nancy Rothwell of the British Neuroscience Association finds herself with a lack of young researchers with experience of experimenting on live animals, has she considered that this may be because they disagree with this method in principle?
Attempts to recreate Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke and epilepsy in animals do not accurately model the human diseases. Neurological diseases in humans are the result of underlying conditions, which may develop over time and be associated with several contributory risk factors. Lesions induced by toxic injection or brain surgery in otherwise healthy animals only superficially resemble the human disease. They also inevitably lead to much suffering for the animals.
Monkeys are often used in this type of research, but in addition to the problems raised by deliberate brain damage, monkeys’ brains are not simply scaled-down versions of our own. There are fundamental differences in neuroanatomy that cannot be overcome by extrapolation. There are better, safer methods available for the study of neuroscience that don’t involve animal suffering, and these are the methods that urgently need more investment by institutions and young researchers.