For the record
鈥� David Meddings of the World Health Organization was misquoted as saying a fungal infection affecting tsunami survivors could be treated with cheap antibiotics (5 February, p 6). What he actually said was that unlike the fungal infection, the vast majority of wound infections can be treated with cheap antibiotics. Also mucormycosis is the name of the disease. The fungus in this case is called Apophysomyces elegans.
鈥� In “Miracle Weed” (5 February, p 38), we incorrectly said that Martin Schnelle conducted the trial of the oral cannabis preparation Cannador in 2003. Schnelle’s group supplied the preparation, but it was John Zajicek of the University of Plymouth, UK, who led the research.
Feedback’s piece about converting units of measurement (12 February) referred to the units of acceleration as metres per second. That should of course have been metres per second squared.
Chances of survival
Bob Holmes’s piece on conserving biodiversity hotspots concludes with a quote from David Wilcove saying that the utility of hotspots depends on “whether you think it more important to save the largest number of species or the most representative cross-section” (5 February, p 10).
He’s right of course, but the discussion avoids another important question: the chance of success. If conservation efforts seem futile then perhaps we should admit defeat and relegate some species to an existence in captivity, while using our scarce conservation funds for species with a better prognosis. Can we rank species according to their likely long-term survival with and without conservation intervention?
Almost seen by Galileo
I am having considerable trouble with your article concerning the possibility that the Milky Way’s black hole was a million times more energetic 350 years ago (5 February, p 8).
I enjoyed your argument that gamma rays from the black hole would have been turned to X-rays when they reached the Sagittarius B2 hydrogen cloud. I also liked the mathematics of your observation that Sag B2 was 350 light years from said black hole and therefore this extra activity could have been observed by Galileo had he but invented a gamma-ray telescope. Where I am stumbling is how these X-rays were apparently instantaneously observed on Earth, a planet some 26,000 light years from Sagittarius B2.
Hazel Muir writes:
鈥� We understand your point. The sun is about 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic centre so anything we observe from that region really happened something like 26,000 years ago.
However, we do make it clear in the article that we’re referring to the timing of what we see on Earth. We decided in this case it would be clearer to describe events from the point of view of what we actually observe.
Superbug busting
Until the era of the clean-by-design hospital envisaged by Jennifer Mason arrives (12 February, p 26), there are some simple measures that can be employed to combat MRSA straight away.
One is to screen the hospital staff for MRSA on a regular basis and where necessary administer eradication therapy. The one thing every patient on any given ward has in common is exposure to staff.
Once a patient is known to be infected with MRSA, staff should find out which rooms the patient occupied prior to diagnosis. They should screen the patients in those rooms and disinfect the area. Most people admitted to hospital occupy more than one room during their stay, which increases the potential for infection.
The Adams asteroids
I feel I have to add to your piece about the asteroid Douglasadams (Feedback, 12 February). The name for asteroid 2001 DA 42 was suggested to the International Astronomical Union’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature for three reasons. As Feedback says, 42 is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything offered in Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Also 2001 was the year of Adams’s untimely death and DA are his initials.
It should be noted that just days before Adams’s death, the IAU named an asteroid Arthurdent, after one of the main characters in his books.
Choose your groove
Dorothy Rowe argues against the view that we have no control over our psychological destinies (5 February, p 21). This reminded me of a limerick: There was a young man who said, “Damn! I now understand that I am A being that moves In predestinate grooves, Not a car, not a bus, but a tram.”
Remembering the control advantage of conscious planning, I have come up with a reply:
The young fellow then thought, “No, It is not necessarily so, The argument fails, I can lay my own rails And go where I want to go.”
So don’t be browbeaten by naive pessimists.
Trouble with oats
Yesterday I was discussing with friends which grains were used in making whiskies, and I turned to Jim Murray’s Complete Book of Whisky. The book says that early 19th-century American distilleries used a mixture of oats and maize to make whisky, but the sticky nature of the mixture meant that the stills clogged up and could explode. Consequently the practice fell out of favour. Oat-based whiskey was also made in Ireland up to 1975.
After consulting the book, I settled down with the 8 January issue of New 杏吧原创 (I am behind in my reading and trying to catch up). I turned to Feedback and came across Diane Erwin’s competition entry saying she knows of no liquor made of oatmeal. There are obviously strange forces at work.
Taking a stand
As a 78-year-old, I followed the instructions in Erik Foxcroft’s letter on how to place one’s feet to reduce falls when walking (29 January, p 26). I found that my gait closely resembled that of a pre-second world war beat bobby.
Prime error
Referring to a poster saying: “Thirteen ghosts. Terror has multiplied”, Greg Roughan asks “multiplied by what, dumb-ass?” (Feedback, 19 February). The answer is: “Multiplied by 13, dumb-ass.” All prime numbers are the product of themselves and one. So previously there was terror, and now there are 13 terrors.
Big bang messages
I was intrigued by the idea that a sufficiently advanced civilisation might be able to send information through a big bang or crunch (5 February, p 30). It made me wonder if any such civilisation existed in the universe prior to ours.
If that civilisation managed to encode any information in the fabric of the last big bang, shouldn’t there be traces of it that we might be able to decode?
It could be present in fluctuations of the background microwave radiation or in galaxy clusters and other patterns of matter. Has anyone ever tried to decode these patterns?
Warming to task
As a neutral observer, I welcomed Fred Pearce’s global warming article (12 February, p 38). But there are surely some critical questions outstanding.
The famous “hockey stick” graph produced by Michael Mann in 1998 embodies the idea that the 1990s were the warmest decade in the warmest century of the past millennium. The climate reconstruction of Anders Moberg et al published in Nature recently (vol 433, p 613) has the shaft of the hockey stick looking more like a boomerang. If Moberg’s analysis had been published in the 1990s rather than the hockey stick graph, we would have concluded that global warming had been increasing since 1600 (implying it has nothing to do with industrialisation), that the 20th century was no warmer than the 11th century and that the warm years in the 1990s were merely ill-understood climate fluctuation.
Why is it that the hockey stick graph was not recognised to be wrong when it clearly did not show the well-known mini ice age of the 15th and 16th centuries? Is this a case of everyone assuming that everyone else’s data is accurate without the necessary critical analysis to provide balanced assessment? And to what extent is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) peopled by scientists who are committed to the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming and who therefore forward information uncritically?
Of the 928 peer-reviewed papers referred to in Pearce’s article, how many actually produced real climate data, and how many of the scientists were already convinced by inaccurate data such as Mann’s and merely reiterated what they took to be true? I believe from my own searches that there are studies critical of the idea of global warming that looked at data from remote-sensing satellites and failed to find evidence of high-atmosphere warming.
My own reaction on reading Moberg is that an independent audit of the IPCC is surely in order by scientists uncommitted to either point of view but able to deal critically with the information. Without that audit strong suspicions will remain that there is too much belief and too little critical science in the organisation.
From Sandy Henderson
In the crucial debate on anthropogenic climate change, the responsible sceptics have a double burden of proof. First they must specify what level of warming they would accept as proof, while making sure that the global situation is still reversible once that level is reached. They must also prove they have a realistic strategy for that reversal within the limits of available technologies and economic structures. Failing that, they are no better than ship’s passengers who are more concerned with obtaining a first-class cabin than with the seaworthiness of the vessel.
Braco, Perthshire, UK
From Steuart Campbell
Many people believe that it is already too late to stop global warming. The US government is ignoring the problem and China and India are both developing countries exempt from cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, so there is little hope of reducing the carbon dioxide level below 500 parts per million. Consequently a temperature rise of more than 2 掳C is almost certain.
However, while we cannot in the short term hope to reduce the level of greenhouse gases, we can reduce insolation in various ways. One of the most effective would be the solar shield which New 杏吧原创 discussed briefly in the feature “Sunblock” (23 September 2000, p 28).
Such a shield between us and the sun can take the heat out of global warming and give us time to do something about the rising level of greenhouse gases. It would cost a great deal, but then allowing the world to cook will cost us a great deal more, perhaps even our survival. A plan to construct the shield is urgently needed.
Edinburgh, UK
Flu unknowns
While we bemoan the fact that there is insufficient action in producing vaccines and drugs against bird flu (5 February, p 5) there are surely other aspects to investigate, such as schemes for cutting down transmission of flu viruses.
Do face masks actually help? Should we avoid the closed systems of aircraft and air-conditioned buildings? Is it true that respiratory virus infections are often passed on by contaminated hands and if so, which would work better, frequent hand-washing or making touching your nose or mouth taboo? Would it do any good to isolate sufferers and possibly even their families?
If bird flu did start to pass from human to human, it would be very useful to have instructions to help individuals avoid infection until an acceptable vaccine was available.