Stun the gun maker
The new breed of electric stun weapons seem to have a huge potential for unwanted side effects (19 June, p 24). I assume that any government agency intending to buy such weapons will insist on repeated demonstrations, with the targets including all designers of the weapons and senior executives and board members of the manufacturer. This might encourage greater concern for potential targets.
Fit to bear babies?
Your editorial states: “With the bitter lessons learned from the days of eugenics and the Nazi atrocities, history has taught us that it is not fruitful for society to decide who has the right to reproduce and how” (12 June, p 3).
On the contrary, regulation of reproduction is one of the primary functions of society. Although we, like all animals, have the ability to procreate freely, almost every society has rules to determine who may and may not reproduce. For example, girls are frequently forbidden to procreate until they reach a certain age, even if they become fertile before then. Reproduction between close blood relations is usually forbidden, although the degree of closeness varies with the society. Marriage is a social precursor to reproduction in order to legitimise the offspring. Throughout history and across the world, permission to marry and have children has almost always been a social function.
Extreme forms of social regulation, such as the Nazis, Shaka’s Zulus or the Puritans, are undoubtedly not the way most of us would want a society to operate. But their excesses should not be used as an argument against all forms of social control over individual actions.
Understanding dogs
Kate Douglas tells us that dogs have a wider range of barks than their wild ancestors, and that humans, even those not familiar with dogs, can often distinguish between these barks (12 June, p 52). She suggests that over the many thousands of years that humans and dogs have lived and worked together, the dogs have evolved these barks in order to communicate with their humans.
Very likely, but the humans will have evolved too. Whatever the nature of the relationship has been, presumably mostly hunting and guarding, humans with more ability to work well with dogs will have had a competitive advantage over those with less, and being able to understand the dogs’ utterances will have been part of that. This will have provided selection pressure. This is co-evolution, and we have become Homo sapiens canophilis.
Palestine's water
Your article correctly points out Israel’s new water strategy: retain control of the main aquifers of the Palestinian West Bank while getting the US to provide desalinated water to the more than 2 million Palestinians living there (29 May, p 6).
Israel’s appropriation of the water resources of Palestine blatantly violates international law, including the law on belligerent occupation and customary international water law. The latter requires the equitable and reasonable allocation of shared (international) watercourses and the avoidance of significant harm to another party. Israel’s determination to control and use the bulk of the available groundwater (and presumably also much of the flow of the river Jordan) can hardly be deemed “equitable and reasonable”.
Furthermore, the logic behind the desalination proposal is flawed. Rather than desalinating seawater and pumping it more than a kilometre in altitude to the Palestinians, would it not make more sense to allow Palestinians rights over their own water resources while letting Israel desalinate water for its coastal population? Desalination is certainly an option for both Israelis and Palestinians, but Palestinians should first be allowed access to their own water resources which currently are illegally and unjustly appropriated by Israel.
Mitochondria myth?
Philip Cohen, reporting on the man who had inherited mitochondrial DNA from his father, asks whether such inheritance “occurs frequently enough to undermine the many studies that assume these processes do not occur” (22 May, p 14).
The word “assume” seems well chosen. Back in 1996 (28 September, p 64) you published a letter from Jim Cummins of Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia, who wrote: “Mammalian sperm not only contain mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA, but pass them on to the egg at fertilisation. The only exception to this rule is the giant sperm of the Chinese hamster (and possibly some insectivores)”.
Time and time again I have come across articles in New 杏吧原创 in which the myth Cummins condemns is perpetuated. A recent example is Hal Whitehead, who makes the claim in relation to sperm whales (15 May, p 42). I can’t help wondering, as Cohen does, how much research would have to be scrapped if the claim that mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the female became generally recognised as false.
Philip Cohen writes:
鈥� A lot of work would need to be scrapped if this was proved false. But the bulk of evidence favours the almost exclusive maternal inheritance of mitochondria in mammals, including the discovery of a specific mechanism that destroys male sperm after fertilisation. The case reported in this article, while intriguing, may be very rare, and the rarer paternal inheritance is, the less of a problem it is for biologists who assume maternal inheritance to be the rule.
How mass works
The conventional wisdom that one particle 鈥� the Higgs boson 鈥� “gives” particles mass by “dragging on other particles as if miring them in molasses” leaves much to be desired (12 June, p 3 and p 13). Even if physicists should find the Higgs, we will remain ignorant of the essence of mass until we have an explanation of just how the “dragging” and the “miring” take place.
By attaching so much significance to a particle 鈥� the “God particle”, no less 鈥� physicists are, I believe, mistakenly concentrating on things. Is it not more fundamentally important to seek to understand the process? What is the process whereby matter produces inertia? What must a chunk of matter, like this magazine, for example, be doing to manifest the properties of mass? Dragging and miring, and resisting acceleration (the definition of inertia), are not explained by particles.
Venus in reverse
Your speculations about the reason for the retrograde rotation of Venus (5 June, p 32) are not up to date. Work by Alexandre Correia and Jacques Lascar at the Paris Observatory shows that the interaction of the planet’s tidal forces and thick atmosphere caused its rotation to behave chaotically in the past. It turns out that even if Venus started with normal rotation, it would probably end up with retrograde rotation. This can happen either by the axis moving (the “north” pole going to the south), or by the rotation slowing to zero, and then starting up again in the opposite direction. There is no need for any other explanation.
Letter
I was deeply offended at the following piece of popular-science speak in Hazel Muir’s Venus review. “Why would Scots love living on Venus? Because every other day is New Year’s Eve and all-night parties would last as long as two Earth months.”
This insensitive lumping together of Scots as lushes, carousers and party animals is a vile canard and deeply obnoxious to us Irish, who, of course, are the world’s leading exponents of extreme celebration. If Muir is going to engage in national stereotyping, she could at least try to pick the right nation.
Parasite park
Bob Holmes reports that nature reserves intended to preserve biodiversity also become reserves for parasites (5 June, p 14). I am delighted. I can’t see why this is a problem. I would respectfully observe that parasites are part of the biodiversity of the planet and have as much right to be here as we do. If it makes it easier to stomach, why not consider all nature reserves primarily as parasite reserves and view the interesting higher animals as hosts. The results will be much the same to look at, and a lot of angst will be avoided.
Why drugs kill
Ann Wills claims herbal medicines are safer than prescribed ones (19 June, p 30). But prescribed drugs are dangerous because they are effective. Herbal remedies are usually safe for the opposite reason 鈥� either they don’t do anything or the effect is very weak.
Moreover, herbal remedies are typically consumed by the “worried well” or those with chronic, but not life-threatening, conditions. Side effects, when they occur, are unlikely to create severe complications.
The main consumers of prescribed drugs are the seriously ill and the elderly, who are often taking several medications simultaneously. The risk of adverse effects in such patients is high, but higher still is the risk of death or severe discomfort if pharmaceutical intervention is withdrawn.
Zero conduction
In your article about electricity conduction, you mention that the perturbative theorists maintain that thin films cooled to close to absolute zero will become insulators (29 May, p 38). Doesn’t this have to be true by definition? Isn’t the temperature of a material defined by the kinetic energy of the particles in it? If the material conducts, then electrons flow and thus have kinetic energy, raising the temperature above absolute zero. And the better the material conducts the faster the electrons may flow, so the higher the temperature will be.
Long way from space
The X prize, which may be won in the near future, does not amount to someone really going into outer space (26 June, p 6). Expanding on a metaphor presented by Arthur C. Clarke, you can state the energy gain necessary to get into space in terms of the height of a wall you would have to climb under constant sea-level gravity. By that calculation, getting to the X-prize height represents climbing a wall 80 kilometres high. Low Earth orbit is the equivalent of climbing a wall 3228 kilometres high. A geosynchronous orbit requires a climb of 5984 kilometres, and escaping Earth’s gravity equates to a wall 6375 kilometres high. At its highest point, the craft that wins the X prize will be at the bottom of a 6000-kilometre cliff separating it from where true spacecraft go.
That private firms may win the prize at only a fraction of the cost of what governments spend to get into space is no big surprise. Unless they can figure out how to get the remaining 99 per cent of the energy they need into their spacecraft, and how to shed it again on re-entry, the feat does not amount to any new road to space.
I wish I could win a prize for solving just 1 per cent of a problem. I personally think that the endeavour to get to space is heroic. However, it is always flirting with the risk of being a pointless stunt.
Make them pay
Tim Mullen is naive in saying the owners of computers without virus protection and a firewall are responsible for the damage their computer invokes when a virus from their computer spreads (12 June, p 26). If these people were not operating a computer, but a car, the manufacturer would be responsible.
The law requires car manufacturers to build safe vehicles. Somehow, that is still not true of computers. So stop chasing the hackers, and start chasing the guys that sell software almost as rich in safety loopholes as it is in code lines. Get Bill Gates and the rest to pay for the damage they are inviting those hackers to invoke.