For the record
鈥� There was an error in the graphic showing predicted evolution of our galaxy (16 July, p 33). The small image marked “125 million years in the future” copied the present position, and succeeding images were out by 125 million years.
鈥� SpaceShipOne flew to an altitude of 100,000 metres, not 30,000 as we said on 6 August, p 23.
鈥� The cute big cats in the photo on 13 August, p 41, were snow leopards, not cheetahs as stated.
鈥� Many Canadians have been quick to remind us that, with the exception of Lake Michigan, the Great Lakes are not just part of the US (20 August, p 18), but are part of both the US and Canada and jointly managed by both governments.
鈥� Unlike Einstein’s luck, our concentration ran out while we were proof-reading the cover for the 20 August issue. As a number of readers have pointedly reminded us, the first “What if?” line should have read “Einstein’s luck had run out”.
Fascinating rhythm
Aniruddh Patel argues that music has national character that echoes speech (9 July, p 32). We have been assessing non-native speech rhythms at the University of Bristol, and have shed light on how second-language speakers accommodate to non-native speech sounds and prosody.
Castilian Spanish has regular “machine gun” rhythm, whereas English and Dutch have “Morse code” rhythm, with a much greater contrast between strong and weak syllables. Our research shows that competent Spanish speakers of English (and vice versa) are intermediate between the rhythmic extremes of their native languages. In contrast, Dutch speakers of English (and vice versa), make little rhythmic accommodation to their second language. One reason Dutch speakers often have good English accents appears to be that their native speech is rhythmically much closer than Spanish.
From Cesar Rodrigues
Andrew Stiller is quite critical of Patel’s article on the similarities between music and speech in different countries (6 August, p 21). However, there are reasons to suspect that these national differences will indeed exist. Recent studies have demonstrated that musical pieces from different composers achieve different data compression ratios. Researchers have been able to identify the composer of a piece by its compression ratio. It would be interesting to look at broader samples in order to compare countries or different musical periods and styles.
Slough, Berkshire, UK
Junk belt
The discovery of yet more planetoids beyond Pluto (6 August, p 10) prompts a challenge to name the impressive halo of 330 million bits of junk larger than 1 square millimetre that humans have placed in Earth orbit in a mere 48 years. To launch the contest, I suggest the Steptoe (Sanford & Son) Belt.
Into space at snail's pace
Your article reminded us that in January 2004 George W. Bush declared his intent to have men back on the moon by 2020, a gap of 16 years (13 August, p 6). When John F. Kennedy made a similar commitment it was May 1961 and the goal was achieved in July 1969: just over eight years later.
The first time was from scratch. We now have 35 years’ experience to draw on, computer technology has improved by a factor of about a million, and there have been vast improvements in materials technology. I’m sure that I cannot be alone in wondering why a repeat performance, instead of taking less time, is forecast to take twice as long.
Chernobyl's legacy
Your excellent article reporting the studies of health risks faced by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb survivors is marred slightly by your claim that radioactive contamination from Chernobyl is getting worse (6 August, p 9).
It is true that contamination from alpha-emitting americium-241 is increasing in the Chernobyl-affected areas because it is a product of plutonium-241 decay. But overall radiation exposures around Chernobyl are continuing to decline steadily, as the vast majority is from beta-emitting caesium-137 which is declining with a half-life of about 30 years.
Exposure from americium-241 is much lower. The maximum level reached will still be around 50 times lower than current levels of caesium-137. Also, americium-241 (and plutonium isotopes) are much less strongly accumulated in foodstuffs than caesium isotopes.
Overall, this means that current and future radiation risks from alpha-emitters are only a small fraction of present risks from caesium-137.
Natural Fibonacci
You state that the spiral patterns seen on the heads of certain flowers and based on Fibonacci sequences have hitherto been thought only to occur in plants (13 August, p 19). In fact, constructions based upon Fibonacci number sequences and the so-called “golden ratio” have long been known to exist throughout nature, in many objects from seashells (for example, the chambered nautilus mollusc) to spiral galaxies. Logarithmic patterns are also seen in the horns of rams and the curves of elephant tusks. Little wonder, then, that physicists may increasingly find such patterns at the deepest heart of matter as your article describes.
No minimum fee
Your mainly very good article on “soft” cash contained the statement that “credit card companies charge a minimum fee for each transaction” (23 July, p 40).
As the head of pricing for Barclaycard Business, which processes approximately a third of all card transactions in the UK, I can confirm that we do not impose a minimum transaction charge on any of our customers. In particular, the charge for processing credit card transactions is routinely calculated as a simple percentage of the transaction value, meaning a given business will be charged the same for taking a thousand 拢1 transactions as for taking a single 拢1000 transaction. This therefore makes credit cards an ideal mechanism for making and taking small-value payments.
Lure of the beach
Could it be that the intermittent beaching of cetaceans represents the rump of a former shoreline mammal’s urge to return to dry land to breed?
Marine mammals like seals manage their breeding migrations without hazard, although the bulkier sea lions are approaching the limits of their terrestrial mobility. Cetaceans, having reached the more advanced evolutionary stage of turning their backs on dry land completely, may nevertheless experience a residual instinct to return to it, as they did when they were at the half-committed stage represented by seals. They forget that they have grown to a size, and developed a musculature, which works wonderfully when supported by water, but represents a mortal handicap above the tideline.
The deaths of individuals that yield to this instinct will in due course wipe it out, since fewer and fewer beachers will pass on their genes. When we see a beached whale, we are witnessing natural selection at work.
Having started as fish, evolved into land mammals, and returned to their original element, cetaceans will not be able to change their minds again. Dollo’s law, which says characteristics abandoned in the course of evolution cannot be regained, means that when the last beachers have died out, the surviving whales and dolphins will never again experience an urge to leave the water.
Junk belt
The discovery of yet more planetoids beyond Pluto (6 August, p 10) prompts a challenge to name the impressive halo of 330 million bits of junk larger than 1 square millimetre that humans have placed in Earth orbit in a mere 48 years. To launch the contest, I suggest the Steptoe (Sanford & Son) Belt.
Kidneys for sale
It comes as a surprise that Mark Cherry is a philosopher (13 August, p 20). Reading his article, one would expect an economist in thrall to the market.
Has he never read Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship? First published in 1970 and reissued in 1997, this book contrasts the British system of relying on voluntary blood donors with the American one in which the blood supply is largely managed by for-profit enterprises. Titmuss shows how a non-market system based on altruism is more effective than one that treats human blood as just another commodity.
Blood is a renewable bodily resource. We might expect that Titmuss’s arguments would apply even more forcefully to the non-renewable items that are our organs. A market in organs would be one more step in the destruction of community, the loss of commons, and the triumph of marketised individualism.
And we should consider the long-term cultural effects of treating human bodies as mere assemblages of replaceable spare parts. From organ transplants to fertility treatments, we are already a long way down that road. While the recipients of such treatments hope to reap individual benefits, there may be arguments other than fundamentalist religious ones for questioning vigorously the presumed wider social benefits of commodifying our bodies.
From David McHugh
There would undoubtedly be a mass of selfless people in the developing world willing to have their body parts harvested for the rich in the developed world in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty.
But as a society, should we not strive for the benefit of all, and not just the elite?
Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland
From David Robertson
We have a limited renal capacity that declines as we age and is subject to deterioration through immune complex formation, arterial disease and infection, so there is no “redundancy”.
There are also the risks of complications for the donor and exposure to pathogens for the recipient. It would be far better to speed up “clean” stem cell technologies.
Tollesbury, Essex, UK
Painless surgery
Is it really remarkable that a conscious patient may report “cutting and sewing inside me” without manifesting pain (6 August, p 34)? Most internal organs, not only the brain, are insensitive to cutting when done expertly. Among the organs, skin is exceptional in its sensitivity to pain. Once under locally anaesthetised skin, painless incision is unsurprising.
There is a substantial literature on relatively painless internal surgery using neither general anaesthesia nor hypnosis, but relying solely upon local anaesthetic at the region of entry. There is also an extensive literature on the use of hypnosis in surgery, all of which alleges the efficacy of hypnosis as an anaesthetic while simultaneously admitting that in successful cases it was found necessary to use paralysing muscle relaxants, stupor-inducing doses of anxiolytics and, most pertinently, local anaesthetic.
This self-deluding nature of belief in hypnosis, in which assertions are made using evidence that actually contradicts those assertions, is one of the most intriguing features of the topic.
From J. Robert Sneyd, Peninsula Medical School, University of Plymouth
Your article suggests that Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville has discovered something new. Far from it. Surgery under local anaesthesia, with or without sedation, is commonplace. Hypnosedation is a confusing and unsubstantiated term covering the triple mixture of local anaesthesia, sedation and hypnotism.
A quick check on PubMed shows that hypnosedation for anaesthesia is mentioned in only eight articles, of which six are by Faymonville. To demonstrate that hypnosis adds anything to routine sedation requires randomised trials comparing three groups: one, general anaesthesia; two, sedation and local anaesthesia; and three, hypnosedation 鈥� that is, hypnosis plus sedation and local anaesthesia.
No such studies exist. Rather there are a series of comparisons between hypnosedation and general anaesthesia which demonstrate the already well-known benefits of local anaesthesia. The only three-way comparison is retrospective and non-randomised, so it is likely that the hypnosedation patients were atypical and self-selected.
Until demonstrated otherwise, hypnosedation should be considered as a modified form of local anaesthesia plus sedation with no proven additional benefits.
Plymouth, Devon, UK
Science in court
Perhaps rephrasing the title of your editorial as a question, “Can science balance the scales of justice?”, would have been more apt (30 July, p 3). The debate over shaken baby syndrome shows that, yet again, an unproven scientific hypothesis has been mistaken in the courts for proof beyond reasonable doubt (30 July, p 6).
We have seen this before with everything from bullet-lead analysis (9 April, p 4) to polygraphs (18 April 1998, p 21) to “Meadow’s law” (31 January 2004, p 3) and the “anal wink test” for sexual abuse of children (30 July, p 8). Even fingerprints have much less scientific basis than most believe (16 June 2001, p 42). On the flip side, eyewitness testimony is still admissible despite compelling scientific evidence that it is nearly worthless (18 November 2000, p 28, among many others). Far from balancing the scales of justice, science is being used as a thumb on the scales to convict innocents.
Getting rid of paid expert witnesses would be a big step in the right direction; they could perhaps be replaced by independent scientific advisory boards. Peer-reviewed “white papers” on topics that commonly arise in the courts could also be agreed and then used throughout the legal system.
If an expert witness must be used, much stricter standards should be applied to ensure competence and impartiality, and the courts should actively solicit countervailing opinions from mainstream scientists. Scientific opinions that are not backed by statistically significant peer-reviewed studies should not be admitted.
Judges should not be allowed to hear cases that involve scientific testimony unless they have passed an examination showing a basic competence in science, probability, and so forth: not a PhD, just enough exposure to science to be able to judge scientific evidence rationally.