Everyone spoofs
Anyone who thinks that “spoofed” headers is a reliable indication of spam is living in a fantasy world (7 February, p 26). Spoofing email headers is a legitimate and widespread practice. In fact, many small businesses and individuals with private websites would have difficulty operating otherwise.
It is not unusual for someone to host their domain name with one company and use another ISP for their dialup or broadband connection. It is also not unusual for ISPs to block outgoing connections to external mail servers. In these cases the only way for you to send an email “branded” by your domain name is to “spoof” the address it comes from. It should be pointed out that spoofing is hardly an arcane practice 鈥� all email software lets you enter whatever you please for the sender address when you configure your account.
Air force
I don’t know if the intriguing idea of the ghost condensate is correct or not (7 February, p 32) but I was worried by the statement: “It is no more able to transmit forces than, say, air” as I am currently watching the blades of a windmill turn.
Stephen Battersby writes:
鈥� What was meant was that particles of the ghost condensate 鈥� like air molecules 鈥� do not act as quantum carriers of a fundamental force.
Love hurts
Might New 杏吧原创 have an opportunity for a matchmaking exercise with the 14 February issue?
David Williams of the University of Westminster, UK, finds both males and females take longer to report pain when tormented by a woman (p 16). Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, New Jersey, makes no distinction between the pain of rejected love for males and females, but her “imagine” example is a perfect example of the social conditioning that leads to expectation of males inflicting the pain (p 40).
Three questions immediately surface: is there a sex difference in reporting the pain of rejected love? Does it matter whether the person to whom we report pain is a male or a female? And does it matter if the interviewer is the same sex as the sufferer or the other sex?
Shouldn’t we get Williams and Fisher together for some interdisciplinary research?
Warrah, warrah
I was interested to read the article by Dan Whipple on the warrah, or Falkland Islands fox (20 December 2003, p 80), and the following letter from Bo Fernholm of the Swedish Museum of Natural History (31 January, p 39). A photograph caption in the article states that there are only two complete specimens and that the one illustrated is in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The letter informs us that another complete example can be found in the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
This would seem to account for both the specimens, but in a recent trip to Naturalis, the natural history museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, I noticed a further specimen labelled as a Falkland fox. What was on display was a full mounted animal which took its place in the museum’s “treasure chamber” among the equally rare mounted blaauwbok, Dodo bones, and other sad examples of humanity’s impact on the natural world.
The editor writes:
鈥� That makes three. Do readers know of any other specimens out there?
Heel, seal!
I enjoyed Stephanie Pain’s article on using seals to find submarines during the first world war (14 February, p 48). But it seems to me that a much more natural way to use the talents of these animals is to control shoals of fish in the same way as sheepdogs control flocks of sheep. And it should be eco-friendly too.
Contentious bones
Rodney Dillon made some excellent points in his open letter to UK culture secretary Tessa Jowell, “Show ancient bones the proper respect” (14 February, p 18). Yet his article makes the claim that of the 20,000 sets of human remains in the Natural History Museum in London, “most were stolen from graves and traditional burial sites during the days of empire”. In fact, most of the skeletons came from within the UK.
Dillon, however, does reinforce the case for cooperation between the scientists who wish to perform research on the skeletal remains and the community who claim ownership of them. Would that the report of the working party had taken such a balanced view, instead of recommending automatic repatriation (for which read reburial).
However, his concern that indigenous Australian peoples are bearing the brunt of the proposed research on skeletal remains while others are not required to make such a “sacrifice” is nonsense.
Anthropological research is not parochial. Isolating specific remains in such a way would make our knowledge all the poorer and indeed the effect would be to denigrate the very people that Dillon would have us believe he is helping.
Control the cocktail
Tam Dalyell’s piece on the long-awaited regulation of chemicals within the European Union ends by saying we should only approve the proposals if they don’t damage industry (17 January, p 45). I am astounded at this in light of the overwhelming evidence on the global impact of these chemicals.
A study commissioned by the EU’s Environment Agency shows that there is insufficient toxin and eco-toxin data available for 86 per cent of 2500 chemicals on the European market in large volumes, to make even a minimal risk assessment under existing guidelines.
There are countless examples of wildlife being born with birth defects, fish being “feminised” and mammals with impaired immune systems all linked to industrial chemicals.
A survey by WWF-UK last summer found that the blood samples of everyone tested contained a cocktail of toxic man-made chemicals, some of which can pass from mother to baby.
The truth is that we are living in a contaminated world and these polluting chemicals are compromising our children’s future. When will politicians face up to the fact that environmental regulations do not impede industry but offer opportunities? The question they have to ask themselves is: do they want a cutting edge, green industry or a dying, polluting one?
Gene sharing
Your article offers some interesting hypotheses to explain the sharing of genes between and among distinct human populations (7 February, p 40).
But the article begins with a fallacy that undercuts much of author Laura Spinney’s argument.
In the US, African Americans and European Americans agree that anyone who appears to have any African ancestry is deemed an African American, even if most of the person’s ancestors were of European descent. Therefore, when the author says, “there is no evidence of genes from African American women in groups of Americans with European ancestry”, she is simply restating the social fact that “anyone with evidence of genes from African American women is automatically assigned to the group of African Americans and excluded from the group of European Americans”.
Manfred Kayser of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology writes:
鈥� The reader is right and we make this important point in our paper. Of course there is a bias in the degree of truth of self-identification of “ethnic” (more accurately, geographic) origin, since an African American’s (AA) genetic contribution to a European American (EA) tends to be more visible, for instance, by skin colour, than an EA genetic contribution to an AA. Why did we not detect an AA genetic contribution to the EA gene pool? The answer is probably that offspring of AAs and EAs, regardless of who is male and who is female, will most likely identify themselves as AA.
I would like to clarify one point made in the article. As well as a European male genetic contribution to the AA gene pool, we also found a European female contribution, although we estimated it to be much smaller. In other words, our data also provide evidence of relationships between AA men and EA women in historic times, though these were far less common than the converse arrangement.
Letter
You say that 20 per cent of the Balinese gene pool came from Indian male ancestors which implies that Bali became Hindu because of its location (7 February, p 43).
Many readers may not realise that Bali is a relic area of Hinduism. Hinduism and, later, Buddhism, dominated the whole of south-east Asia from around the 1st to the 16th century. Rulers of many places, including Java, Bali, and the Malay peninsula, adopted Hindu practices, and had links at many levels with India and with other cultures influenced by India (such as those in what is now Thailand).
From the 16th century onwards, most of the rulers converted to Islam, but Bali remained Hindu.
I wonder whether the Brahmans in Bali had the highest percentage of Indian YDNA? One of the groups imported by the Hindu rulers was priests, some of whom would have been likely to have moved from Java to Bali when their masters there became Muslim.
Sour potatoes
You report that sweet potatoes genetically modified to resist a virus in Kenya proved no less vulnerable than ordinary varieties (7 February p 7).
If this is true, it is disappointing but perhaps unsurprising, given the complexity of sweet potato diseases. It is clear that the aetiology and epidemiology of such diseases must be understood and taken into consideration in future research.
Fortunately, well-targeted research on sweet potato virus disease in East Africa has been funded by a range of donors, including the crop protection programme run by the UK Department for International Development. This programme recognises that sweet potato is an important food security crop for poor farmers in this region, especially women. There is also an increasing demand for it in the expanding urban centres, both as fresh tubers and also as processed foods.
Researchers at our university led an international team which showed that sweet potato virus disease is actually caused by the interaction of two viruses, sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus (SPCSV) with sweet potato feathery mottle virus (SPFMV). Natural resistance to SPFMV alone failed when plants were pre-infected by SPCSV.
It is therefore interesting that genetically engineered resistance to SPFMV on its own also failed. Perhaps it will be necessary to include resistance to both SPCSV and SPFMV viruses for improving sweet potato yields in Africa.