Not the case
You accuse the phrase “Closed CCT TV” of riotous redundancy (Feedback, 26 February). The problem with this phrase is not redundancy, but the fact that CCT was written in upper case rather than lower case letters. The letters “cct” are a common abbreviation for the word “circuit”. So “Closed cct TV” would make perfect sense.
For the record
鈥� The Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution (PACE) project mentioned in our feature on artificial life (12 February, p 28) has, contrary to what the feature said, begun lab experiments, though these do not involve evolution of artificial cells.
鈥� The terrestrial micro-organisms that synthesise methane are archaea, not bacteria as we stated in “A whiff of life on the Red Planet” (19 February, p 6). The archaea are, like bacteria, single-celled organisms that lack a nucleus. They were mistaken for bacteria when first discovered, but are now recognised as an entirely separate kingdom of life.
鈥� Data tracks on computer hard discs lie in concentric circles, not a spiral as we stated (26 February, p 26). CDs, however, do have spiral tracks.
鈥� We failed to check what turned out to be a spoof report when we said (12 February, p 34) that a Segway transporter was used in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in February 2004. Sorry.
Heavy smoking
In your report on marijuana causing headrushes (12 February, p 17), the author notes that after a month of observed non-smoking in a clinic, there was no improvement in people who smoked more than 78 joints a week on average. I know a lot of people who smoke cannabis, but I have never known of anyone smoking 78 joints a week.
This reminds me of the study by Robert Heath in the US in 1974. Heath made rhesus monkeys smoke the equivalent of 63 joints in 5 minutes in a gas mask so they would not lose any of the smoke. They suffocated and some died. So the government proclaimed “cannabis kills brain cells”, which it may. We unfortunately still don’t know because of the lack of credible studies. Instead, we get studies funded by political groups with their own agenda.
Patent absurdity
For many years there has been freely available in the market a fairly large solar panel (which could act as a sunshade) intended for charging a car battery via the cigar lighter socket (do these devices still exist in this anti-smoking age?). The Lucent application should therefore fail due to this “prior art” (19 February, p 25).
After all, it was the US patent office which rejected a patent application for raising sunken ships by filling them with ping-pong balls, on the grounds that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had already published the idea.
Fat figures
I am sure his letter was somewhat tongue in cheek, but may I correct Ken Brown’s conclusion that fatties are “green” (12 February, p 27). He states that 20 per cent of the world’s population is overweight, and reducing this would release 10 billion tonnes of CO2.
Let’s assume the worst case: that these 1.2 billion people are so overweight that they carry, on average, an extra 64 kilograms of carbon 鈥� which would means they were so obese as to be immobile, since the fat and associated water would weigh far more than that.
This would be converted into about 234 kilograms of CO2 (taking round-number atomic weights for carbon and oxygen of 12 and 16 respectively), making less than 300 million tonnes of CO2.
As most extremely obese people live in the developed countries, they will use more fossil fuels to travel around, and use more resources for clothing (which has to be transported), and healthcare etc.
The only conclusion is that obese people are not green.
From Craig Murphy
Obese people require more fuel to transport themselves, whether by train, car, bus or plane. This may not be a huge amount for one obese person, but globally must add a large amount of extra carbon dioxide and other pollutants to the atmosphere.
Secondly, obese people are far more likely to eat processed foods, which often have plastic wrapping which is not recycled as commonly as glass or paper and so this ends up in landfill sites, yet again polluting our environment.
Finally, by eating more, obese people are requiring more food to be cooked and prepared, which uses more energy, and where does that energy come from? It will most probably come from a power station that burns some kind of fossil fuel. Overall it seems that obese people contribute quite a lot of excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Worplesdon, Surrey, UK
Unite and fight…
You report yet another instance of the Bush administration’s political meddling in science, this time at the Fish and Wildlife Service (19 February, p 4). Sadly, such interference is old news. The question is, when are scientists going to do something about it?
This is an incredibly dangerous situation that cannot be allowed to continue. Our entire planet is being put at risk by the Bush administration’s deliberate denial of scientific fact. We need to make a lot more noise about this. Strikes, protest letters, sit-ins, press releases, mass resignations, debunking websites, political lobbying, ballot initiatives…the possible tools at our disposal are legion. It is time to act.
Unlimited space
I have read more than one letter in your pages lamenting the CO2 emissions of the future tourist space industry. I am unpleasantly surprised at people’s shortsightedness.
Protecting the environment only makes sense in a place of limited resources, such as Earth. Our planet, however, is a part of space, and space has unlimited resources. Do environmentalists intend to stay on Earth indefinitely 鈥� until the next comet strike, or until the population has become so large that all trees have had to be cut down?
The long-term goal can only be to eliminate the problem of limited resources altogether, and that can only happen in space.
Bye bye black holes?
Your article “Bye bye black hole” (22 January, p 28) proposes that stars may collapse into “fuzzballs” of cosmic string. We have suggested a very different model for the end point of gravitational collapse in several papers, notably Philosophical Magazine B, vol 81, p 235, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 111, p 9545.
We suggest that when quantum effects are taken into account, the end point of gravitational collapse is not a black hole at all, but a cold, macroscopic quantum object, which we call a gravitational condensate star. Since the amount of information (entropy) stored in this coherent quantum state is very small, there is no information paradox and no need to “explain” the huge entropy of a black hole by invoking an enormous number of hypothetical string-like configurations inside a “fuzzball”.
In our model the formation of the quantum critical surface (in place of an event horizon) does not require any “teleportation” of information at faster-than-light speeds. Further, the interior condensate does away with the singularity at the centre of the black hole. Such a singularity is fundamentally inconsistent with the existence of a stable lowest energy state for the system.
As always, it is experiment and observation that will decide which approach is right. If astronomical observations eventually confirm that gravitational condensate stars exist in the universe, then indeed it will be time to bid “bye bye” to black holes.
For the birds
Once again bird flu rears its ugly head, and once again the scientific community is going to convoluted lengths (including animal experimentation) to find cures and vaccines (19 February, p 8). Yet there is a simple way to wipe out bird flu forever: stop breeding and eating birds.
Eating lower down the food chain brings other advantages too. Less land and water will be needed to feed the world because it is much more energy-efficient for humans to eat vegetable crops directly than to eat them through the intermediary of an animal. Eating lower down the food chain means fewer pesticides are used because fewer crops are grown. Eating at the top of the food chain causes diseases and health problems such as variant CJD from BSE in cattle, superbugs created by antibiotics in animal feeds, cancer, heart disease and food poisoning.
If meat, eggs and dairy products were not subsidised and not from factory-farmed animals, then people would see them as occasional treats rather than a daily necessity, or give them up altogether.
From A. M. Wooster
Could we, I wonder, avoid a devastating pandemic of avian flu by spreading immunity though an epidemic of a relatively harmless disease?
The approach I have in mind would start by genetically modifying the outer coat of a common cold virus 鈥� or some other highly infectious but not particularly dangerous virus 鈥� to resemble the outer coat of the avian flu virus, or some other part of it. Deliberately causing a pandemic of this relatively harmless disease would then leave people’s immune systems primed to recognise the avian flu virus.
This seems such an obvious idea that I wonder whether it is already being worked on.
Riva del Garda, Italy
Not only for the birds
I enjoy the Feedback column. I read it in every issue that I see. However, I take exception to the item that poked fun at the nut warning label on the insect-laden bird food (12 February).
My 8-year-old daughter has a severe peanut and nut allergy. A few grams could set off a reaction that could kill her. A small crumb with enough peanut could be transported to someone’s clothing or hair, and then unintentionally to food that could be ingested. The extra warning not only alerts her that she shouldn’t handle the product, it also provides a back-up warning to her father that he must be extra careful and wash his hands.
I realise that I used “could” four times in the above paragraph, and that (could)4 is very close to zero. However, the consequences of such a coincidence, unlikely as it is, are devastating. I view this in the same way as some people view nuclear power: the likelihood of an accident is almost zero but the consequences are huge.
It would be a shame if someone thought they should remove the allergen warning from the product just because the product is not meant for human consumption.
The business end
Jennifer Washburn’s statements about the need to separate universities and business ignore the reality that in a business-driven culture patents are necessary to get some inventions to the public (12 February, p 19).
For example, if a drug is discovered in a university lab and publicly announced, it cannot then be patented and so no drug company will produce it. Who will shoulder the cost of proving the drug’s safety and efficacy to the satisfaction of the Food and Drug Administration if any company can then produce and sell it? Without the patent, no one will benefit from the discovery generated by the university’s free exchange of ideas.
Washburn needs a more elaborate plan of how to get the discoveries of modern laboratory research out to the public 鈥� in this culture, in these times.
Bods of the gaps
Your list of ingredients for artificial life 鈥� containment, heredity, metabolism and evolution 鈥� comes with an extraordinary omission (12 February, p 28). It fails to take into account the painstaking contribution of the research teams. The degree of collective effort by the research teams is directly proportional to the degree of complexity of the task. As the intellectual input increases, the probability of success increases in direct proportion. If the task were simple it would require little or no input for success.
This project and others like it demonstrate (scientifically) that probability for biogenesis is highest where intelligent input is greatest. The laboratory pattern 鈥� matter coordinated intelligently 鈥� affords the only model we actually have upon which we can legitimately (that is, rationally, as opposed to through some freaky leap of faith) base our understanding of how life began on Earth.
Your omission of the contribution of the research teams in the Los Alamos Bug project is modelled on the same omission on a grander scale in the popular belief that life arose spontaneously from inorganic matter. This belief lacks rational foundations and furthermore has no known model to support it.
Don't mix viruses
Your editorial and news story reporting that Charles Arntzen has decided to grow vaccine proteins not in potatoes but in Nicotiana benthamiana, a wild tobacco relative, are encouraging (19 February, p 3 and p 19). They are, however, implausible in one important detail.
The reason given for the change of plan was that the vaccine genes may get into the human food chain. But so what? The hepatitis B vaccine protein won’t endanger anyone who eats it. It is not a toxin.
A more pressing reason for the change is that the licensing authorities in the US now accept that a vaccine transgene may genetically alter a passing plant virus and produce a novel virus, which might be dangerous. This is known to occur naturally, as well as being a possibility with genetically modified plants. Circoviruses such as those that cause weaner wasting in pigs and beak-and-feather disease in parrots, arose naturally by the union of genes from a calicivirus (of rabbit fame) and a nanovirus (of bananas). How it happened no one knows, as no virus of a vertebrate animal is known to infect plants, and vice versa.
What is encouraging is that the licensing authorities appear to realise that crop plants are more likely to escape than others, and that we bring together unusual and untested combinations of viral genes at our peril.
Better bombs
The first sentence of your article on bunker busters begins with the assertion: “It seemed too good to be true when the US Congress last year blocked funding for bunker-busting nuclear weapons” (12 February, p 6). Why, in a news article in a science magazine do you push your strong political opinions? Why do you state the position of anti-nuclear groups, but not those whose reasoning leads them to strongly support research on these weapons?
Nations with rogue nuclear programmes like North Korea and Iran have placed their clandestine bomb-production facilities deep underground. Terrorist groups are also using deep bunkers to hide their nefarious activities.
In the future there may be a need to deal with these threats militarily. Since conventional weapons in the inventory would not destroy these targets, one would have to use megaton-size nuclear weapons to remove them. This would have detrimental effects on a large geographical area. Clearly, it would be much better for all parties to have a “bunker buster” that would destroy the designated underground target with no, or minimal, collateral damage.