Delicious whalemeat
What seems to have escaped the protagonists on the whaling issue is the fact that minke whalemeat is delicious.
On the other hand, I first tasted pilot whale when visiting the Faroe Islands and was unimpressed, as on that occasion it was rather greasy in texture with a fishy aftertaste. However, some years later I came across some whale steaks in the freezer of a supermarket in Kristiansund, Norway, and decided to give it a go. As advised by our Faroese friends, who said you could eat the devil himself if you boiled him long enough, we boiled them up with onions, skimming off a rather foul-looking froth a few times, and added potatoes for the last 20 minutes.
When it came to serving up we were all filled with trepidation, as the sight and smell of the cooking had been far from appetising. Amusement followed as each in turn took a tentative grimacing sip of the almost-black gravy followed by a beaming smile as enthusiasm for the flavour and the fine texture of the meat overcame all misgivings.
Autistic pride
I found some of the ideas in your interview with autistic scientist and author Temple Grandin interesting and plausible (4 June, p 50). But there is something to offend autistic people in most popular articles and scientific papers about autism, and this interview is unfortunately no exception.
Grandin says in the interview, “An autistic person’s brain works more like a child’s brain, or an animal’s. They don’t have complex emotions such as shame or guilt.” Speak for yourself, Ms Grandin.
If autistic people don’t experience the emotions of shame or guilt, then how do you explain the widely reported autistic aversion to lying and deception? Some of the most moral and trustworthy people I know are diagnosed with the autism spectrum condition Asperger’s syndrome, so the idea that we don’t feel guilt makes no sense to me.
I noticed that Grandin used the words “them” and “they” when referring to “an autistic person” in the interview. Being a proud Aspie myself I use the word “we” when referring to autistic people.
And Grandin says we are impaired in language abilities, which is ironic when I consider the fact that Grandin has achieved her greatest fame from being a writer.
Animals and us
Congratulations on an outstanding line-up of articles on the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationships between humans and other animals (4 June, p 42). The articles did a great job of portraying how public attitudes about animals are changing 鈥� faster in some places than in others, and more readily regarding some animals than others.
Like some of the authors and people interviewed, my stance on animal issues has been shaped by both the scientific evidence showing similarities between humans and other animals, and by watching and studying animals directly. If it is true that changes in attitude or behaviour towards animals are linked to the amount of information and experience we have about them, it could explain why people now have a better attitude to companion animal welfare, for which they can call on personal experience, than for animal testing, a practice cloaked in secrecy in the US, and unfamiliar to the majority of Americans.
Information about animal testing is not always fully reported in the scientific literature 鈥� as New 杏吧原创 has pointed out (21 August 2004, p 6). And even when it is, it is often presented in language that lay people find hard to interpret. Making information available and accessible is a public good: the “Animals and us” articles serve as an excellent model for readable science.
From Peter Jones
Gary Francione’s article confirms that the animal rights movement is at core a human-centred philosophy (4 June, p 51). Its followers say they want to stop the use, exploitation and suffering of all non-human animals, but if their concern were truly about reducing the pain and suffering of animals rather than trying to control the actions of other humans, wouldn’t they be concentrating instead on stopping the actions of non-human carnivores and omnivores?
If humans and non-human animals are equivalent, then why is it only wrong for humans to eat meat? The common answer from animal rights supporters is that humans can choose not to eat meat…which of course is an admission that they, too, see humans as different from other animals.
The animal rights movement is like any other fundamentalist belief system: a core absolutism combined with a view that “not only do I know unquestionably how I want to live, I demand that you live that way, too.”
Boston, Massachusetts, US
From Antony Black
You class “Be wise as serpents, gentle as doves” as a Hebrew proverb (4 June, p 49). Since it appears in Matthew’s gospel of the Bible, it was written in Greek; if it was spoken in Palestine at that time, it would have been in Aramaic.
Dundee, UK
Mozzie mortality
The fungal approach to killing mosquitoes as a measure against malaria could have an effect quite out of proportion to the immediate lethality of the fungi (18 June, p 16).
Insects infected by the malaria parasite are more vulnerable to the fungus. If the infected are killed and the uninfected survive, there will be enormous selection pressure on the mosquito population to develop resistance to the malaria parasite. If there is any trace of variation in the ability of the mosquito to resist infection, these differential mortality rates would cause resistance to spread like wildfire.
Animal tools
Jane Goodall’s belief that she was the first person to see a non-human use a tool is not correct (4 June, p 47). Fred Merfield describes in Gorillas were my Neighbours, the 1956 book he co-wrote with Harry Miller (Longman, Green), how in the 1920s he watched chimpanzees use a stick to poke into a bees’ nest and withdraw it coated in honey.
Plane facts please
With your article on building the Airbus A380 you show a graph comparing other Airbus planes and the Boeing 747 with the new A380 (11 June, p 34). Features such as maximum speed and number of passengers are mentioned, but surely this graph should have two extra columns.
These would show average fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions per 1000 kilometres. Perhaps even better would be an approximation of the number of trees that would need to be planted to counteract the carbon dioxide emissions.
In this time of rising awareness of global warming and resource depletion, the costs of these “advances” in transportation should be clearly indicated and the need for them questioned.
From Nigel Friswell
Ben Bowie reports that Airbus can change the flight control software remotely. What an opportunity for hackers and terrorists!
Horsham, West Sussex, UK
Vanadium conundrum
In the article on moon dust Dana Mackenzie writes that Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 reported hay fever-like symptoms on his return journey (28 May, p 40). When I was an engineer in a South African vanadium plant in the 1970s, I experienced flu-like symptoms, and discovered that dust from the purification process was the cause. Perhaps finely powdered metallic elements in moon dust have a similar effect.
Recreational grass
Graham Lawton’s interesting article on artificial turf (4 June, p 35) reminded me of the comment attributed to Joe Namath, one of American football’s great quarterbacks, when asked if he preferred AstroTurf to grass. The story goes that he replied, “I don’t know. I never smoked AstroTurf.”
Refraction detection
With the article on the position of stars in the night sky you printed a diagram showing possible negative refraction around the ergosphere of a black hole, the zone surrounding it from which energy and matter can escape (4 June, p 30). This showed Earth’s plane of orbit in the same plane as the ergosphere.
Would it be possible to check for negative refraction by measuring the location of a star at the two extremes of the Earth’s orbit? Surely negative refraction would shift the location.
In this vein…
The article on using helical grafts for bypass surgery, rather than straight ones, was very interesting (11 June, p 28). There is also a technique using vein grafts that has extremely promising follow-up results. This “no touch” method avoids exposing the vein to the surgical trauma that it suffers in conventional vein harvesting, aiming to remove it with minimal surgical damage.
Presumably the manufactured grafts mentioned in the report are quite expensive. It might be possible to improve the function of a graft merely by improving methods of surgical preparation.
Striking planes
Gary Streeter raises a timely question about the possible effect of lightning strikes on composite aircraft (11 June, p 22). There is indeed a difference in electrical resistance between metal and composite, and aircraft are struck by lightning quite often.
The composite parts are protected by incorporating a layer of metal mesh on their outer surface. This has been safe and successful for many years, though it is more critical now that Boeing is to make an all-composite fuselage for the 787, and Airbus is making composite wings. Airbus aircraft have had their fuel-containing horizontal stabilisers protected this way for a number of years, and each of the parts is regularly tested for lightning strike resistance.
From Matthew Bell
An aircraft gets struck by lightning once a year on average, so aircraft made using composite materials are designed accordingly. For example, the Eurofighter Typhoon has a composite body coated with a layer of aluminium. This conducts the lightning around the body of the craft and burns away in preference to the composite material. In this way the resin matrix of the carbon composite maintains its integrity, and the material does not fail.
Castletown, Isle of Man
Fat fact
In your article “11 steps to a better brain” (28 May, p 28) you say that triglyceride is a “cholesterol-like substance”. Triglyceride is a general term for a whole class of fat molecules. Chemically they are not at all similar to cholesterol, apart from consisting mostly of hydrogen and carbon, with a few oxygen atoms. The only real similarity is that high levels of both are associated with atherosclerosis.
For the record
鈥� Our chart of broadband access in the 25 European Union nations showed Denmark twice and omitted Finland (11 June, p 25). It should have shown that more than 14 per cent of the populations of both countries have broadband. Also a chart of US online music sales (18 June, p 27) failed to mention that the figures were as a proportion of total music sales in the country.
鈥� Chickens turned up where they had no business to be: in a list of mammals whose genomes are being sequenced (18 June, p 14). Chickens are not mammals.
鈥� In “11 steps to a better brain” (28 May, p 28) we said that triglyceride is a “cholesterol-like substance”. Triglyceride is in fact a general term for a whole class of fat molecules.
Hunting dinosaurs
I very much enjoyed your articles on recent dinosaur discoveries (21 May, p 34). They reminded me of an idea sparked off by a statement by Mike Williams in his 1994 paper “Catastrophic versus noncatastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs” (Journal of Paleontology, vol 68, p 183). “The decline in both numbers and kinds of dinosaurs…is consistent with a gradual decline or possibly an accelerating decline, but not a catastrophic one.”
A gradual decline could be explained by the existence, well before the asteroid strike, of an intelligent, social dinosaur with the hunting capabilities of our distant ancestors. Palaeontologists would perhaps not recognise such a dinosaur, particularly if it was at the early stage of technological development reminiscent of our early ancestors.
The editor observes:
鈥� Oddly, this is almost exactly the plot of a short story entitled Extinction Theory by our own correspondent Jeff Hecht.
Retired, not fired
In response to New 杏吧原创‘s report that The Wildlife Trusts will not be renewing David Bellamy’s presidency, we would like to emphasise that Bellamy was in any case due to retire at the end of his second five-year term as president in November this year (11 June, p 4). He has been discussing options for his successor with us for some time.
For over 50 years he has made an exceptional contribution to The Wildlife Trusts, donating over a year of his time during his presidency alone to promoting our cause throughout the UK. We are delighted that he will be continuing to help us to inspire people about wildlife after he steps down as our president.
Archive deserved better
Tam Dalyell raised the issue of priceless first world war records being digitised because there may be no space to store them (21 May, UK and US editions, p 55). Anyone who has walked on the public footpaths near the National Archives at Kew, London, cannot but have noticed the luxury housing on what used to be lawns.
There would have been space for many decades of expansion at the archive had this land not been sold. Has this government, like the last one, been selling off the family silver in order to appear to balance the books?
Waste proposal
There is an area called Maralinga in the state of South Australia that remains contaminated from the UK nuclear testing programme of the 1950s. It is geologically stable, isolated and secure.
It is arguably one of the best sites in the world for radioactive waste (18 June, p 3 and p 12). However, the not-in-my-backyard factor dominates the debate about using it, even though few people live within hundreds of kilometres of the area.