Letter
The map of consumption is really a map of how to disguise consumption. To let the US off the hook by comparing its consumption of biological resources to its production of the same merely serves to highlight the huge disparities and inequities in the global distribution of resources and human population.
The truth lies in the final statement that North American people consume three times as much as western Europeans 鈥� who are already high consumers when compared with the less-developed nations of the world. Globalisation means that we can no longer look at any issue country by country, but must consider the planet as a whole. Both North Americans and Europeans consume a far greater proportion of the world’s biological resources than they deserve to, and nations fortunate enough to be richly endowed with natural resources have just as much of a duty to reduce their consumption as countries which have few or none.
Tell us about Beagle
I applaud your call for open publishing of the Beagle 2 report (29 May, p 3). This project was not only followed by astronomers and scientists, it also stimulated the interest of the public 鈥� something that should be encouraged.
We all want to understand what went wrong, but the information is denied to almost everyone, even those actively involved with Beagle 2. All we can glean from the “recommendations” is that the project was one big shambles. This seems unfair on those who worked hard under difficult circumstances and gave so much to the project. They have a right to know the facts, as do taxpayers and other stakeholders.
Such secrecy will only discourage financial support for future missions and lead to suspicion and lack of confidence in the UK’s space programme and project-management abilities. A failed experiment can be a valuable learning tool and need not be wasted time or money 鈥� so long as data from it is properly and openly used.
Odds on flukes
Dana Mackenzie’s fascinating article well illustrated the power of statistics to extract insights from data (26 June p 36). It also highlighted the prevalence among scientists of a serious misconception about statistically “significant” results.
The article describes how, in November 2000, experimenters at the Large Electron Positron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, found evidence for the much-sought Higgs particle in the form of detections, where the odds of these being a fluke were just 2 in 1000. In fact, this is not what the odds imply, and believing they do is a fallacy that statisticians have been vainly trying to warn scientists about for over 40 years.
These odds actually represent the chance of getting at least as many detections as those seen, assuming a fluke was the cause. Having been calculated on that assumption, the resulting odds patently cannot also be taken to be the chances that fluke really was the cause. And yet this is what physicists 鈥� and indeed scientists in general 鈥� have routinely done for years.
Does it matter? Yes. Statistical theory shows that the true chances of a fluke are typically far higher than those suggested by the cavalier interpretation of odds so often made by scientists.
Intriguingly, Mackenzie’s article indicates that physicists have already spotted this 鈥� without recognising its implications. He remarks how physicists have had their fingers burnt “many times” by relying on 2-in-1000 results, and that according to folklore such results are wrong 50 per cent of the time 鈥� a bizarre 250-fold discrepancy between statistical expectation and reality.
There are of course any number of reasons why “significant” findings prove disappointing. Even so, it is high time scientists recognised that chief among them is the fact that all too often their grand expectations are based on a simple misconception.
Who made God?
A joker once called the Higgs boson “the God particle”, and the processes highlighted by Rick Benish in his letter are akin to the old unanswerable question: If God made the universe, who made God? (3 July, p 31)
If a process explains a phenomenon, what process explains that process? Processes have no higher philosophical status than particles: in fact, they have less, since the latter can at least be detected and measured, and the only way we can know anything about processes is by observing particles.
And isn’t the attraction or repulsion between two particles, say, itself a process? Supposedly fundamental explanations that invoke processes attempt to get knowledge to pull itself up by its bootstraps 鈥� they are logically invalid.
Neither science nor any philosophy can do other than relate the observed phenomena of the universe to each other in the most elegant, economical manner.
The editor writes:
鈥� See “Mass hysteria”, for more on the Higgs
Micro motor
Reading about micro-engines reminded me of an old idea for conversion of direct heat to rotary motion which was apparently too inefficient for use at the macro scale, but should be more efficient at the micro scale (19 June, p 26).
The principle is best illustrated by a simple example: consider a disc of soft magnetic material which is free to rotate between the poles of a magnet whose field is applied across its diameter. If a small area of the disc at its circumference, not quite in line with the magnetic poles, is heated above its Curie point, then the disc will rotate. This is because of the way the field lines are diverted in the heated area, which cools as it rotates away, while a new area is heated. Obviously, the magnetic material will heat and cool much quicker if the disc is very thin, which should make the motor faster and more efficient at the micro scale.
This motor deserves serious investigation, not least because of its simplicity.
Factor in the oil
Fred Pearce summarises Marc Imhoff’s study on regional ecological footprints, based on the proportion of primary production consumed locally (26 June, p 9). The North Americans are said to come out of the study well.
However, Pearce’s article did not mention how Imhoff dealt with exports and imports. Are imports added to local consumption? Is secondary production included 鈥� particularly the contribution of offshore fisheries? And does Imhoff separate the productivity of natural ecosystems from energy-subsidised agriculture?
Above all, I would have expected Pearce to comment on the nonsense of leaving fossil fuels out of the equation. Imhoff’s map only tells us that some regions have higher population densities than others, some parts of the world are more self-sufficient than others, and some parts have more unutilised vegetation than others. What it does not tell us is that the US footprint only appears lighter because Imhoff didn’t include the fact that North America massively subsidises its consumption of primary production through being the world’s greatest user of fossil fuels. So exactly how useful is Imhoff’s study?
Running on ethanol
The piece about the Team Nasamax bioethanol-fuelled car was more than intriguing to me (19 June, p 19). Down here in Sydney, I have successfully run my oldish carburetted car on fuel containing up to 80 per cent denatured ethanol, with only minor mixture adjustments needed, and some small sacrifice in fuel consumption and performance. Trying to shout this from the rooftops has been met only by official obduracy. The oil industry and our elected representatives have countered the pro-ethanol argument with half truths verging on blatant lies.
For the record
鈥� In our Technology Trends article (3 July, p 24) on automatic sports highlights software we misspelt the name of University of Rochester, New York, computer scientist Ahmet Ekin. Apologies, Ahmet.l The animal shown on the opening page of our Animal Minds special (12 June, p 41) was a male drill, not a mandrill as our caption stated.
Heavy lifting
Brian Richards rightly points out the merits of modern dirigibles for transporting bulky objects (26 June, p 30).
Unfortunately, helium is widely seen as the only satisfactory buoyancy resource. Helium is truly wonderful, but it is very scarce. World annual production of the gas is only sufficient to allow the building of 1000 Hindenburg-sized airships per year (see New 杏吧原创, 21 December 2002, p 48).
Hydrogen has better lifting capabilities, but is regarded as too dangerous for use as a buoyancy agent. One way of improving its safety might be by using what I call the “double bubble”, where an outer envelope of ammonia surrounds a hydrogen envelope within.
Ammonia has fair buoyancy capabilities and, though unpleasant, does not explode. It is produced, used, transported and stored with comparative safety in quantities exceeding 100 million tonnes per year. Any leakage from the hydrogen envelope would find its way into an atmosphere of ammonia 鈥� in which it cannot explode and which could be constantly monitored.
This is not a perfect solution 鈥� and there may well be better ones 鈥� but if a fraction of the development effort expended on non-buoyant aircraft were directed to this problem, we might yet begin to see the environmental, economic and aesthetic benefits of airships.
Make your own
Your article on ayahuasca claims that dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the only hallucinogen produced naturally by the body (26 June, p 42). This is incorrect.
After the second world war, reports emerged of oxidised adrenalin causing hallucinations in users of outdated asthma inhalers. They also occurred in anaesthesia patients who were given “pink” adrenalin during the war.
In 1952, Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond and John Smythies, in conjunction with D. Hutcheon, D. MacArthur and V. Woodard of the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine in Saskatoon, Canada, developed and verified the hypothesis that adrenochrome, an oxidised derivative of adrenalin, is an endogenous hallucinogen structurally similar to mescaline. This hypothesis has been controversial for the past 50 years due to difficulty in assaying the unstable adrenochrome molecule.
Nevertheless, adrenochrome and its toxic breakdown product adrenolutin have been found in the urine and blood of people with schizophrenia. It was determined recently that adrenochrome is produced in substantial quantities in heart muscle, so the controversy over its endogenous synthesis has finally ended.
Adrenochrome is not unknown to the recreational-drug crowd and readily produces the desired hallucinations and thought disturbances 鈥� and occasionally bad-trip symptoms similar to those of paranoid schizophrenia.