Donor risk
You discussed some of the issues with egg donation, such as whether donors should be paid (12 March, p 3). As a neurologist, I think the risk of donating eggs is probably played down by gynaecologists. In Switzerland, the information given to potential donors casually mentions “thromboembolic complications”. How many women reading that would realise they may be putting themselves at risk of losing an arm or having a stroke?
An IVF patient of mine nearly died after suffering a severe stroke, and even after months of intensive neuro-rehabilitation she will always be severely limited in everyday life as a result. By going through this, she became the mother of a healthy baby. But can anyone be expected to accept the risk, albeit a slight one, of such a devastating complication for someone else, out of pure altruism? How much of a financial incentive would make up for such a risk?
Glaciers are cool
Further to your coverage of climate change and melting ice in the Himalayas (19 March, p 6), it should be pointed out that glaciers in many other parts of the world are not shrinking but in fact are growing.
Norway’s glaciers are growing at a record pace. All 48 glaciers in New Zealand’s Southern Alps are growing, the Franz Josef by about 4 metres a day. Pio XI, the largest glacier in the southern hemisphere, and the Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest in Patagonia, are also growing despite the fact that they should be melting because of warm winds zephyr’d from El Ni帽o seas.
Glaciers are real cool in California, where all seven on Mount Shasta are growing apace and three have doubled in size since 1950. Further north, in Washington state, America’s youngest glacier in the crater of Mount St Helens holds a record for fastest-growing lump of ice. Not far away is America’s most studied glacier, the one on Mount Rainier, which was melting catastrophically until 1931.
News from the Antarctic shows that the harsh desert valleys have been getting cooler since the 1980s and that the ice in many parts is thickening. So bad is it in places that the old Admiral Byrd station has disappeared, squashed under 3 metres of ice.
Meanwhile at the other end of the world researchers point out that, contrary to global-warming headline-grabbing dogma, Greenland has over the last 40 to 50 years shown statistically significant cooling.
Indeed, if you take all the evidence that is rarely mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration, 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.
Where is all this new ice coming from? It can all be explained by the 0.6 掳C rise in temperature of the past century or so. Admittedly it is not much, but enough to evaporate billions of tonnes of extra water vapour up into the air.
Keep dope out of court
A causal link between cannabis use and schizophrenia seems tenuous at best (26 March, p 44). There are, however, clear links between contact with the criminal justice system and a deterioration of mental health.
In many countries, upwards of 30 per cent of young people have used cannabis and thereby committed an offence that potentially carries a jail sentence. If those who advocate criminalising cannabis use are serious about wanting to reduce the risk of mental illness among young people, I can only hope that they direct their energy towards finding a penalty that reduces harm, rather than increasing it.
I have yet to speak to a lawyer, police officer, magistrate, judge, psychologist or social worker who believes that processing young people through the courts is a useful treatment for mental illness.
From Ian Barrett
I question whether the allegedly extra-strong varieties of cannabis really are unusually powerful, and in particular whether they are a new phenomenon.
I have observed many cannabis users, and they typically use significantly less when smoking better-quality cannabis. In the same way, someone who habitually drinks a couple of litres of beer is unlikely to consume the same amount of whisky.
In the end, the legality or illegality of drugs and whether they are classed A, B or C makes little difference to the users out there. They just pick and use the drugs they like.
Cape Town, South Africa
From Bill Measure
Congratulations on pointing out that our knowledge about any link between cannabis and mental health has not been significantly advanced by the two recent studies, even if the popular press has latched onto them.
Jim van Os, an author of one of those studies, does not like the coffee shop at the top of his street in Maastricht. His children have to walk past it, it has shady characters and it illegally sells cannabis to under-18s. But I know that I would rather walk through Amsterdam on a Saturday night among groups of youngsters high on grass than through London or any number of English towns through youngsters tanked up on lager.
London, UK
The nuclear future
Rob Edwards’s article on nuclear reactors in the UK quotes a Greenpeace view that nuclear power is “not the best solution to combat climate change” (26 March, p 9). Bearing in mind the timescale of climate change mentioned in the editorial of same issue (p 5), I would suggest that the nuclear option is not just the best option, it is the only option 鈥� and that even nuclear could not meet the worst-case timescale.
The only solution is the production of abundant energy without generating excessive quantities of carbon dioxide. With our present knowledge that means nuclear. It is high time for Greenpeace to rethink its agenda. If it really wants future generations to survive and thrive, it should make a policy U-turn and start to support a vastly increased research effort into improvements and advances in nuclear power generation.
From Steuart Campbell
Even if cracking in the graphite moderator forces the early closure of British Energy’s advanced gas-cooled reactors (7 stations, but 14 reactors), why do you conclude that this “deals a blow to the idea that nuclear power can become a ‘green’ option in the fight against global warming”? New nuclear reactors are more likely to be pressurised water reactors, like that at Sizewell B. PWRs do not use graphite at all, and there are other systems that do not employ graphite.
Edinburgh, UK
On the horizon
Discussing the “horizon problem” of the uniformity of the universe, you say “Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other…the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old” (19 March, p 31).
This reflects the popular fallacy that the distance from our galaxy to the farthest observable sources of electromagnetic radiation can be no more than 14 billion light years if our universe is only 14 billion years old. It does not take into account that the expansion of the universe involves the expansion of space itself.
By the time the photon reaches us, the actual distance from its source is greater than the distance it would have travelled if space itself had not been expanding. Aside from this technicality, I agree with the gist of what you say about the “horizon problem”.
From Kevin Jones
Why is the horizon problem a problem? Assuming that the universe did begin with the big bang, and continues to expand to this day, you have radiation travelling 14 billion light years in each direction, with a total distance across the universe of twice that, at 28 billion light years.
Pierceton, Indiana, US
Michael Brooks writes:
鈥� The answer is that the big bang didn’t cause an explosion outwards from a point. Space and time came into being with the big bang, and space has been expanding everywhere ever since.
The 28 billion light years defines the width of the visible universe: we can see that two points separated by this distance seem to have the same temperature, but we can’t understand how.
Robot flaws
The watchful eye of Kismet the bug-eyed robot apparently disposes people toward acts of generosity and altruism (19 March, p 12). The explanation offered is that “being seen to be generous might mean an increased chance of receiving gifts in future or less chance of punishment”.
I have an alternative hypothesis. Kismet is a very strange-looking beastie, and its image probably makes people a bit nervous and xenophobic. Those emotions may encourage people to forge alliances and form social groups so as to band together against the perceived threat Kismet poses.
From Eric Jones
The first thing that strikes me about Kismet is its cuteness. It looks helpless and elicits sympathy rather than greed or fear 鈥� more Bambi than Big Brother. Shouldn’t the researchers run their experiment with a number of different images? I suggest Darth Vader and Marilyn Monroe.
Carmarthen, UK
Creating life
Erik Foxcroft seems to suggest that there is some sort of linear relationship between intelligent input to research and other resources and time required to produce a result 鈥� such as artificial life (2 April, p 29).
I think this unfounded. Consider the time taken by, say, an 18-year-old to demonstrate in class a mathematical task such as integration by parts. Say they take 5 minutes. Will a pupil with half the intelligence resources, or half the “research input” or training 鈥� say a 13-year-old 鈥� take 10 minutes, or even 5 hours? I think it more likely you would never get a clear demonstration of that solution from that pupil, and you would be still less likely to get one if you reduced further to an 8-year-old. It seems that the time would rapidly run off to infinity as the research input was reduced to some required minimum.
Paul Davies clearly showed that some quite simple problems are incomputable in the age of the universe (5 March, p 34). Simply throwing bigger times and volumes at some problems is not sufficient.
Following Foxcroft’s letter, Steve Welch argues against John Athanasiou’s suggestion of the need for an intelligent input to the origin on life on the ground that it does not show a first cause. No theory does. The concept of the big bang only pushes back the question further as to what caused the initial conditions that could allow it. All theories have initial assumptions. Athanasiou simply argues that his assumptions seem to give him a better explanation of his observations.
For the record
鈥� In our news story on genetically engineered soybeans (19 March, p 9) and the editorial accompanying it (p 5), we mistakenly stated that trans-fatty acids are saturated fats. As several readers have pointed out, trans-fatty acids contain chemical double bonds which, by definition, are absent from saturated fats. Although not saturated, trans-fatty acids are thought to have equally harmful effects on the cardiovascular system, which explains why the US is to introduce labels from 1 January 2006 informing consumers of the trans-fatty acid content of foods.
鈥� While drawing up the bar chart for our feature on cannabis and psychosis (26 March, p 44) we swapped the numbers for Sweden and the Netherlands, giving the erroneous impression that the Netherlands, not Sweden, has the lowest consumption among 15-year-olds.
鈥� We misleadingly reported that methane emissions over tropical rainforests are 4 per cent higher than expected (26 March, p 20). In fact the 4 per cent figure relates to methane concentrations above the forests, a difference which requires emissions to be 66 per cent greater than previously thought.
鈥� Reviewing A Geologic Time Scale 2004 (26 March, p 55) we omitted to mention that a paperback edition is available at 拢40, ISBN 0521786738.
Surgical priority
Your article on a partial pancreas transplant is misleading on two counts (12 February, p 17). Firstly, the transplant procedure carried out in Kyoto, Japan, by Shinichi Matsumoto, Koichi Tanaka and myself was an islet transplant, not a partial pancreas transplant. An islet transplant involves injection of digested pancreas tissue into the liver, whereas a partial pancreas transplant requires major surgery to connect artery, vein and pancreatic duct. David Sutherland and his team from the University of Minnesot a have carried out more than 140 partial pancreas transplants from living donors since the 1970s.
Secondly, unbeknown to us previously, Sutherland carried out two living donor islet transplants in 1977 and 1978. In both cases rapid rejection led to loss of insulin independence. The Kyoto transplant is therefore, to our knowledge, currently the only successful living donor islet transplant.
Arthur Dent on Prozac
Feedback reports on the International Astronomical Union’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature linking to “The Last Page of the Internet”, in a throwaway line suggests that some feel astronomers lack a sense of humour (Feedback, 26 February). The company I work for employs many astronomers, mathematicians, physicists, biochemists and other likely readers of New 杏吧原创, many of whom found our vacancies through your pages, and I’ve seen no evidence that any of these groups has a greater or lesser sense of humour.
Having said that, humour in this company is unofficially sanctioned in the selection of names (all beginning with P, for reasons I will not expand on) for our computers. Some names were chosen so that a user’s email icon in Lotus Notes would read “Arthur Dent on Prozac”, say, or “Arthur Dent on Probation”. One branch office went further and named its server PartyOn, so that, when it went offsline, everyone would get the message “PartyOn Down”. But I don’t think an astronomer was responsible for that.
Chilling predictions
William Connolley maintains that 30 years ago no one said an ice age was coming (19 March, p 29). He obviously hasn’t read Nigel Calder’s “Imminent arrival of the ice” in the BBC’s Radio Times (14 November 1974), or David Bowen’s “The next, inevitable, glaciation” in Geographical Magazine (August 1977), or “Chilling confirmation that the next Ice Age is on the way,” in New 杏吧原创 (24 November 1983, p 575). There are dozens more.
Alien sonnet
Terry Cannon writes (5 March, p 33) that his favourite ever headline in New 杏吧原创 is “Everyone came but the earth didn’t move” (31 October 1992, p 5). I have an until-now unpublished sonnet about my favourite, which is “Alien life gets more and more probable every day” (18 May 2002, p 15). I am the author of three poetry books and recent second place winner in the Australian Capital Territory Publishing Awards 2004.
Alien life gets more and more probable every day
A chalkboard, an equation,
Someone to draw then cast the line,
To click the universe onto rewind,
Back beyond the imagination.
Secret agents saying “Put down the chalk.
Now step away from the board, hands raised.”
It could happen, you are afraid;
So hide your calculations and your talk.
No one knows what anyone knows
And the likelihood is rising;
The probability’s surprising
That we’ll vanish as the cosmos grows.
Only maths can reel its size in,
And the aliens, we suppose.
Satellite navigation
You warned that satellite navigation systems may be unreliable on the railways because it is easy to jam Global Positioning System signals (19 February, p 25). But this is much more than a railway issue.
Satnav is already widely used in a number of safety-critical applications. There are a number of ways to remediate against jamming. One is to detect it and revert back to manual or automatic systems which are not dependent on GPS, and to advise users that GPS data is not available.
Technology is being developed in the UK to detect and locate interference with satnav services. This is the type of work that will help to position the UK at the forefront of technologies based on Galileo, the new European satellite cluster launching in 2006.
Old dark matter
You ascribe the origin of dark matter to Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution, and say she “spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s” (19 March, p 33). Maybe she did, but Caltech professor Fritz Zwicky applied the “virial theorem” that relates potential and kinetic energy to the Coma cluster of galaxies in the early 1930s, obtained evidence of unseen mass, and started the debate on what we now call dark matter.
Map plan
Your article on people making their own maps does not note the most obvious reason, besides fun (19 March, p 26). All published maps are out of date and most are quite inaccurate. Using the Fugawi program, I have scanned in many maps over the years, then updated them as I travel. Now, if we could easily feed this information back to the map makers to update their digital maps for public use…
Eurovision attention
Your short news piece says that judges show more favour towards contestants who appear at the end of a competition (12 March, p 16). This reminds me of a comment made by a lecturer during my time at university: the amount of attention a student pays, and therefore the amount of learning done, is highest during the first 5 and last 5 minutes of the class.
Bored and jaded judges during the Eurovision Song Contest? Surely not!
Starch story
The controversy regarding the Atkins diet is topsy-turvy. You report research suggesting that it works because followers simply eat less (19 March, p 12). But the real conundrum is: why do carbohydrates make you fat?
Repeated carb-rich meals make you tired, hungry and ultimately fat, unless you count calories and suffer. But why should humans respond in this way? Probably because that is how our hunter-gather bodies are programmed to respond. Ten thousand years ago large quantities of carbs appeared briefly every year, coincidentally, more often than not, at least for Europeans, just before a winter famine. The optimum survival response in this situation is to eat as much of the abundance as possible before it rots or someone else eats it. For the rest of the year, high-quality carbohydrate was scarce and we lived on leafy plants, ants and meat. It wouldn’t have paid to be too fat, lest the meat bit get away.
When we became farmers the effects of storing carbohydrate from grains was offset by lots of work. Now many people don’t really work, and even the recommended balanced diet probably contains enough carbs to trigger the “get fat, winter’s coming” response 鈥� all year round.