Sweet smell of lurve
With reference to your article about the body’s secret signals, it occurs to me that such signals may be influenced by taking the contraceptive pill (30 October, p 58). This may affect a woman’s body odour and how she in turn perceives odours or other signals. It could also be having a profound effect on choice of partner, and consequently, could be part of the reason why so many marriages break down.
New 杏吧原创’s agony aunt, Margot, responds:
鈥� It may not be a particularly romantic view of love, but you are right. It seems that the pill does influence the way women judge potential partners. One study found that non-pill users preferred the odour of men with a different immune system profile to their own. But the pill throws a spanner in the works, making women prefer men with an immune profile similar to their own. That may be because the pill mimics pregnancy 鈥� a time to get plenty of help from family (New 杏吧原创, 10 February 2001, p 37).
And it doesn’t stop there. Another study found women prefer more masculine faces during the fertile phase of the cycle, but more feminine male faces at other times (Nature, vol 299, p 741). So it is not just synthetic hormones that can affect a woman’s choice of partner.
Ask the Iraqis
So the US is revisiting the issue of Gulf war syndrome (6 November, p 8). How comforting. It seems to me that proof of this phenomenon would be much easier to establish by interviewing Iraqi civilians about their symptoms.
Drug foresight
Helen Phillips and Graham Lawton’s thought-provoking article raised the fascinating subject of the science and study of intoxication (13 November, p 32). Interestingly, my Foresight team is working on a project looking at the future management of psychoactive substances, by which I mean substances that affect the brain, such as leisure drugs, drugs to treat mental illness and cognitive enhancers.
The project is an evidence-based science review of the future of addiction and substance use in the light of social, economic and scientific changes. We are examining whether science and technology could help us to manage the future use of psychoactive substances to the best advantage of the individual, community and society over the next 20 years.
The project outcomes will be published during the summer of 2005. Its progress can be followed at , where visitors can also register to receive the Foresight newsletter.
Still a hard problem
Peter Rowland is right to insist that consciousness arises only from a material source and cannot be considered as disembodied or non-material (6 November, p 31). However (as he would possibly agree), recognising this fact does not get rid of the hard problem, and neither does his improved analogy of consciousness as the flame resulting from the hydrogen/oxygen reaction rather than as the resultant product, water.
The properties of the flame and how they arise can all be explained, at least in principle, in purely physical terms. The hard problem consists in the fact that we have no such analogous explanation for how the qualitative content of experience can arise from the electrochemical reactions of millions of neurons.
Still a hard problem
It might be pointed out that software requires hardware to run it. This does not mean it is created by the hardware. So while Rowland’s flame analogy may be correct, there are alternative metaphors. In fact the flame analogy seems more applicable to life than to consciousness, but this is not a new observation.
Getting an earful
It is unsurprising that pan players in steel bands risk the same hearing loss as orchestral musicians (13 November, p 19). I write as one who has regularly suffered the back-blast of assembled French horns while sitting in the front row of a chorus.
Some years ago I had occasion to carry out some acoustical tests on steel pans made for the Notting Hill carnival in London. Tuning pans requires the vigorous application of a large hammer, carried out (in this instance) in a large breeze-block workshop. I guess that steel pans are the only musical instrument for which the wearing of ear defenders while tuning is mandatory.
Prehistoric dumpers
Your article on the dating of early settlers by their rubbish does not mention the possibility of rubbish-dumping around 10,000 BC (13 November, p 10).
The evidence of garbage in ancient dwellings in Wadi Hammeh 27 is assumed to mean that the people had no systematic method of garbage disposal. But perhaps it indicates the opposite 鈥� that previously abandoned homes provided a handy depository for the pre-Neolithic equivalents of old supermarket carts, car tyres, drinks cans and builders’ rubble.
I did the maths
You entitled your article “Do the maths” (30 October, p 60) and I did. It states that 25 million (or 1 per cent) of the 25 billion red cells in my body die every day. It’s been decades since I got my degree in mathematics, but 1 per cent of 25 billion used to be 250 million. If the mathematics hasn’t changed (and I hope it hasn’t), which of the three numbers is wrong?
Claire Ainsworth writes:
鈥� Yes, we did get our powers of 10 mixed up: 1 per cent of 25 billion is indeed 250 million; and 250 million red blood cells per day is roughly 3000 per second, not 300,000.
I did the maths
So bats are most closely related to the ferungulates (13 November, p 16)? Pigs might indeed fly!
For the record
鈥� In the biographical details after “We have ways…” in our interrogation special (20 November), we stated that the author, Ian Robbins, had had experience as an interrogator during the 1991 Gulf war. This was incorrect. While he was briefly attached to a US interrogation team, he was not there as an interrogator. He was carrying out research on the psychology of Iraqi prisoners.
鈥� In the article “Coughs and sneezes spread mind diseases” (6 November, p 40) we said that Joanne Webster was a researcher at the University of Oxford. She is in fact at Imperial College London.
鈥� Apologies to anyone who tried to follow up the references in our story “Evolution made us marathon runners” in the 20 November issue. The New 杏吧原创 reference should have read: 11 September, p 15.
Lyme tests
Despite the findings referred to in your article that antibody tests for Lyme disease can be unreliable and that late-stage Lyme is very hard to cure, patients in the UK are being told they do not have Lyme on the basis of negative antibody tests (6 November, p 40). The world authority on infectious disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, has placed information on its website to the effect that diagnosing Lyme disease is primarily a clinical matter.
Patients in the UK who have Lyme-like symptoms but who test negative may not be receiving the appropriate diagnosis and treatment. This could have very serious implications for them and for the health of the nation. We are rapidly collecting evidence that might indicate this is occurring.
Worth the risk
Reading about the possibility that the International Space Station might not be completed because of the rise in cost of shuttle flights (6 November, p 6), I was struck that in all the commotion since the Columbia accident, I have never heard anyone explain why exactly we value the lives of astronauts above all other considerations, from saving Hubble to completing the ISS to basic research in space.
I doubt the astronauts themselves would value their lives in this manner, and even if they did, I would think it a safe bet that thousands of volunteers (myself among them) could be found who would gladly risk their lives to support those goals. Given this, why are we apparently going to allow Hubble to expire, the ISS to fail, and countless other goals of our space programme to fail?
We don’t think twice, apparently, about sending our young men and women to die in ill-considered, counterproductive wars, but we are not willing to take a calculated (and probably fairly small) risk involving a few volunteers’ lives in order to keep our greatest scientific accomplishments from falling into disarray. What does this say about us?