Sun shield
Your article suggests that life will probably be extinguished in as few as 1 billion years, due to the combination of plate tectonics, the moon’s orbit and the increase in the sun’s brightness (6 December, p 36).
However, by far the largest of these factors is the sun’s output, and we can handle this with relative ease. Even with today’s technology we would be able to build a sunscreen in orbit at the Langrange L1 point between the Earth and the sun.
Such a shield would have to be several thousand miles in diameter to block even a few per cent of the radiation, so this would be a very large and costly exercise. But we have several hundred million years to build it, and it would probably enable life to exist for maybe an extra billion years, so it would be a very worthwhile project.
Light-rich niche
I was delighted to read that biology has caught up with the concept of co-evolution through niche construction (15 November, p 43). This appears to be one of the few instances where the social sciences have led the way. Fred Emery and Eric Trist provided a rigorous conceptualisation of co-evolution in 1965. Since then, co-evolution has been elaborated and built on in open systems theory and has proved an extremely useful concept.
I hope co-evolution will be accepted in biology, as I would love to see some studies on how niche construction is affecting our species. There are many possible starting points, but perhaps the priorities could include the long-term effects of spending about 16 hours a day in a light-rich environment heavily dominated by visual media.
Spoonful of sugar
I read the article on “taming the beast” of bacterial infection with great interest, but it does seem to be yet another occasion when the scientists should have started by checking with their grandparents (29 November, p 34).
My ex-nurse wife points out that at one time honey was used as a last-resort treatment for bed sores and similar sores that refused to heal. And in the early 1940s I would sometimes accompany my veterinary surgeon father when he went to treat a cow with an involuted uterus. I watched him push that mass of innards back into the animal. Depending upon the season and the size of the farm, the operation might be carried out in an unheated cowshed, with lighting by paraffin lamps, with hot water brought in buckets from the kitchen, and with the other cattle continuing their normal bodily functions nearby. So it wasn’t exactly an ideal germ-free environment.
The operation took place with the cow standing, with two men supporting the uterus at the required height, and with sugar being poured over the flesh as it went back inside. At a time of severe food rationing, the sugar was usually the farmer’s wife’s hoarded stock for the next jam-making season. I know that I asked my father “why the sugar?”, and regret that I don’t recall the answer, but I do know that the cattle usually recovered without further problems.
Suspect emails
I admire Lucent Technologies for suggesting that their “reverse Turing test” (which sends out challenge responses to emails considered to be “suspicious”) will provide a welcome answer to the problem of new viruses slipping through before you have had a chance to update your antivirus software (22 November, p 27).
Pray tell what happens if you miss the latest update to the list of things that the Lucent software uses to define “suspicious”?
Pick a number
Regarding your report that a New Zealand statistician has shown that the Kiwis were the best team in the Rugby World Cup, the fact that New Zealand were visiting their greatest rivals would have placed the team in such high spirits that we need to reduce their performance results a little (6 December, p 6).
By my calculations 鈥� based on score margins, climatic variance between each side’s home country and Australia, world ranking of each player in the various games, the “high spirits” factor which only impacted on New Zealand, and a number of other spurious factors that Hugh Morton didn’t think of 鈥� New Zealand came fourth.
Alien snapshot
About that cover showing the galaxy with a “you are here” indicator in the middle of it (22 November). Just where was the photographer standing?
For the record
鈥� In our Cutting Edge story on a food label that reveals when fruit is ripe (29 November, p 20), we erroneously said that Ron Henzell led the research team at HortResearch in New Zealand. In fact, the leader of the team that developed the technology was Keith Sharrock.
No more chemistry
I was reassured to read in your article that there is no problem with chemistry (6 December, p 56). I am, however, one of the last students studying chemistry at King’s College London. At the last meeting of the academic board, it was decided to withdraw undergraduate courses in chemistry. This college, with a history of teaching chemistry dating back to 1831, no longer sees the subject as a viable course for it to carry on with.
A previous article in New 杏吧原创 praised the interdisciplinary approach to modern science (1 November, p 52). This decision, however, will leave King’s as the only college in the UK to teach medicine but not chemistry, and one of only two Russell Group institutions (the group of the top 19 colleges and universities in the UK) not to have a chemistry department 鈥� and we can hardly be surprised that the London School of Economics does not lecture in chemistry.
So, the department at which John Daniell invented the precursor to the battery, and at which Rosalind Franklin took the first X-ray pictures of DNA, is to be closed. One more nail in the coffin of universal education.
Market failure
I was surprised and a bit depressed by the comment of Steven Nissen in Philip Cohen’s article on the potential of high-density lipoprotein to reduce fat deposits in arteries. He claims that “no one is going to pay for a trial to test common HDL because there is no commercial potential” (15 November, p 8).
It seems to me that this is a classic case of market failure and should therefore be of considerable interest to governments, particularly in view of the rising health costs associated with increased levels of heart disease. Why is this option not vigorously pursued?
Back to the dark age
Fred Pearce’s doomsday article introduces us to the human-dominated anthropocene era and details how we as a species are inexorably moving towards the brink of environmental disaster through our own self-serving actions (22 November, p 40). Such a catastrophe could trigger the worldwide demise of civilisation and entry into a new dark age reminiscent of the collapse of other civilisations in recent human history.
However, the main difference between this and past events is that because we have so thoroughly plundered our planet of its natural resources, the new dark age could be extremely protracted, if not permanent, affecting not only our own species but perhaps any emergent intelligent species.
Nearly all of our hard-won knowledge resides in books or, increasingly, on various electronic storage media such as a hard disc or CD-ROM. Books, if looked after, may last a few centuries at most, while electronic storage media would be inaccessible to post-anthropocenes, who would no longer have the advanced technology needed to read information in this format. So not only would post-anthropocenes face a dearth of natural resources, but also a lack of the core knowledge vital to overcome this monumental hurdle.
If palaeontology and more recent history have taught us one thing, it is that no civilisation or species lasts indefinitely. We should, as a matter of urgency, establish around the world several repositories of our accumulated knowledge in a readable format that can be retrieved without any advanced technology. These repositories would need to be resilient to the ravages of time 鈥� perhaps located in caverns excavated in geologically stable rock formations. Each repository would need to provide a kind of universal “Rosetta Stone” to cater for the fact that future scholars will almost inevitably speak and write in a totally different language.
Hopefully these repositories will assist post-anthropocenes in their struggle to climb out of the new dark age created by our own inexcusable actions.
Evil intent
You quote Craig Venter saying: “Basic science at every level can’t contemplate people doing evil things. That would stop fundamental advances that have tremendous positive potential,” (22 November, p 8). I don’t know whether he’s naive, or whether the desire for fame and fortune has blinded him. We must contemplate the possibility of people doing evil things with basic science, and especially with the inventing and engineering that permits the synthesis of smallpox virus.
People suggest that cloning be declared a crime against humanity. But cloning can only harm the clone. Revealing how to synthesise deadly viruses may harm all of mankind.
Iris recognition
John Daugman asserts that his iris recognition system generates no errors (13 December, p 34). This claim is akin to a goalkeeper arguing that, based solely on the number of saved goals, he has a perfect record. A more accurate indication of the performance of iris recognition can be derived by taking into account the unruly “misses” that Daugman ignores.
It may well be true that those irises recognised by the system can be matched with extreme accuracy against other irises recognised by the system. The key question is how many irises the system fails to accurately detect and therefore fails to match. The project in the United Arab Emirates cited by Daugman provides no insight. Even if I take at face value the UAE Minister of Interior’s assertion that none of the 3684 “positive hits” was contested, I still have no clue about how many prohibited identities slipped through the system, or how many innocent people were wrongly identified. And neither, I suspect, does Daugman.
A report issued last year by the US General Accounting Office reported that the largest iris scanning system currently in use had only 30,000 records. The GAO warned that it was “unknown” how a system with many millions of records would perform. Generally speaking, whenever the population of a biometric system is increased, the threshold (sensitivity) of the system has to be decreased. The authors of the GAO report and other studies are right to be concerned that a system involving tens of millions of identities would be obliged to compromise security and “positive match” accuracy to avoid an unacceptable level of false hits.
Iris recognition has a role to play in security and population management. But just as with any other biometric system, that role will not be found in an over-ambitious national or global identity system. Such a proposal would involve risks and burdens that are wholly unacceptable to any free society or indeed any marketplace.
Daugman holds the patent for iris recognition. I can understand his sensitivity to criticism. But if he continues to focus only on the most reliable element of his system he does a disservice to those who believe his technology can solve key economic and societal problems.