Oil the Nazis never found
In the course of outlining an alternative Nazi scientific orthodoxy, Steve Fuller suggests that the Third Reich might have won the second world war by diverting its attention from the search for Lebensraum in Soviet Russia towards the Middle East oilfields. In making this point he is actually guilty of the same omission that almost certainly cost the Axis their best shot at victory (20 August, p 36).
Risky, do-or-die offensives to seize oilfields in the Caucasus or the Persian Gulf were not necessary. The Wehrmacht never knew that a pool of crude petroleum sufficient to drive its panzers all the way to Vladivostok, let alone the Volga, was directly underneath its tank tracks.
The oilfield in question was in Libya, and lay beneath the sands over which the 8th Army and the Deutsch Afrika Korps ran the so-called Benghazi Handicap campaign between 1940 and 1943. Throughout that period the limit of Rommel’s striking power was determined by his fragile supply lines, particularly those carrying the oil, which stretched thinner and thinner across the Mediterranean and the western desert the further he advanced.
From right to left
In the piece about instantons, you ask us to imagine a right-handed glove swirling through a tornado so twisted that it comes out left-handed (6 August, p 50). That’s easy enough — the wind blows the glove inside out.
Whose great lakes?
Your correction stating that, with the exception of Lake Michigan, the Great Lakes are part of both the US and Canada was close, but still not entirely correct (3 September, p 19). Lake Huron is entirely Canadian.
Cruel experiment
I am not an animal rights supporter and consider that there is good justification for some regulated experimentation on animals, even if it does result in suffering. Furthermore, I am prepared to argue the case for animal experimentation with those animal rights proponents who are open to sensible discussion.
However, the experiments on African clawed frogs to investigate their sensory mechanisms seem beyond belief, involving the deliberate blinding of frogs in order to satisfy scientific curiosity (27 August, p 13). How do the experimenters justify this?
Test people, not animals
Having been quoted in Soundbites as an “animal rights activist” explaining how I feel about “benefiting from animal testing” through using medicine, I am writing to set the record straight (3 September, p 10).
I am the director of Europeans for Medical Progress (), an independent organisation of scientists whose concern is patient safety, not animal welfare. We support conventional medicine but we aim to improve the safety of medicines by assessing the way they are tested.
Nobody benefits from animal testing when they take medicines. Drugs originate not from such tests but from clinical observation, serendipity and rational drug design. Animal testing became mandatory following the thalidomide tragedy, but it has failed to prevent further disasters. Vioxx, which was used to treat arthritis and acute pain, is the biggest drug catastrophe in history. According to David Graham, associate director of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Drug Safety, an estimated 88,000 to 139,000 Americans alone had heart attacks or strokes as a result of taking Vioxx, as many as 55,000 of them fatal. Smaller drug disasters are commonplace, killing many thousands every year.
New human-based tests could prevent many of these deaths. Microdose studies of volunteers reveal drug metabolism in the human body with accuracy. Yet regulators require animal studies, not microdose studies.
We would all be safer without animal tests, which correctly predict drug side effects only between 5 and 25 per cent of the time, according to studies published in the scientific literature. Action must be taken now to prevent another Vioxx.
Like baby like mum
So fetal stem cells can “patch up” the mother’s brain (20 August, p 8). Astounding. Now I know why I developed eczema after the birth of my third child, who has this complaint. Perhaps I should have DNA-tested my husband before marrying him.
For the record
鈥� While deriding the claims made about the skin cream Neaclear, Feedback itself slipped up in stating that “the oxygen in our atmosphere has been stable at about 18 per cent for at least 3 million years” (3 September). As many readers reminded us, the correct figure is just under 21 per cent.
Shrinking glaciers
While I agree with Fred Pearce’s conclusions on the role of greenhouse gases in 20th century glacier retreat, there is no “flaw in the thaw” as he describes it (27 August, p 26). His suggestion that the glacier shrinkage in the 19th century occurred “long before human-induced climate change could have had any impact” is not consistent with the ice-core measurements on greenhouse gases. These show a clear human footprint by 1800, with both carbon dioxide and methane increasing from levels that had changed little for the previous 800 years.
By the end of the 19th century, the global mean radiative forcing — the change in the balance between radiation coming into the atmosphere and radiation going out — due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations since 1750 was about 0.5 watts per square metre, a quarter of the impact reached by 1990. Calculations using a simple box diffusion model show that this increased the global mean temperature by about 0.2 掳C by 1900, about one third of the warming to 1990.
Because of periods of enhanced volcanic activity and possibly solar variability, the 19th century warming was irregular, with the lowest modelled temperatures, around 1820, in good agreement with the glacial record.
It's not the vodka
The article about binge drinking in Russia, which linked the activity to the drop in life expectancy in the country since 1989, contains some discrepancies (27 August, p 46). It is true that binge drinking is traditional in Russia and is as old as the country. But it was around in the 1960s, when life expectancy in the Soviet Union was the highest in Europe. And the culture of binge drinking is not unique to Russia 鈥� it also occurs in the UK.
As for the cause of the dramatic increase in mortality rate, some Russian researchers have another explanation. Igor Gundarov from the National Centre for Preventive Medicine did a study, published in the book Why Russians Are Becoming Extinct, which showed no correlation between alcohol consumption and mortality rate in Russia. His opinion is that what is killing Russian men is not chemical; a sudden change in values and morals and a switch to a consumer society have had a dramatic impact on the health and mortality of Russians. Being one of them, I can vouch for this.
Take diet-dog walkies
The developers of the robot diet dog should tune its responses. At the moment they are not as constructive as they could be (3 September, p 24).
For example, when the owner has exceeded his or her recommended daily calorie intake, the dog acts depressed and lethargic. Surely this behaviour combined with low-energy music will reinforce the mood that led to the failure of the diet. Wouldn’t it be better to have the dog respond energetically to encourage the owner to get out and use the energy from the food they have just eaten?
Perhaps performance enhancements could even let the owner increase their metabolic output by having to walk or play with the robot dog. This could be taken even further by training real dogs to need to be walked and played with. Real dogs and cats are also good for self esteem, because they are companions who do not judge their owner for being fat. However, fitting a real pet with flashing LEDs may pose problems, such as where to put the batteries.
Setting entropy straight
I wish to address a couple of criticisms of my and others’ work on q entropy cited in Mark Buchanan’s article (27 August, p 34).
Peter Grassberger says, “It is all nonsense”. While it is his privilege to draw such conclusions, the fact that 1200 scientists from close to 60 countries have dedicated their intelligence and efforts to produce roughly 1700 manuscripts exploring the subject clearly indicates that there is a large community who think otherwise. As for his assertion that “it has led to no new predictions”, this is simply untrue, and I can supply him with many examples if necessary.
Guido Caldarelli’s criticism that my equation “just fits data” illustrates a relatively frequent, though understandable, misconception. In principle, Newtonian mechanics has the ability to deduce the orbital eccentricities of the planets, if all initial conditions of the planetary system are known. As this knowledge is unavailable, astronomers determine such eccentricities through fitting 鈥� adapting the parameters in their equations to fit the data. Similarly, the entropic index q can be deduced from first principles if the microscopic dynamics of the system are precisely known. But this too is a rare case, which explains the usual necessity for the fittings that can be seen in the literature.
The road to moon delay
David Getling asks why the proposed mission to return to the moon is expected to take twice as long to prepare as the first attempt, given improvements in materials and technology since the 1960s (3 September, p 19). Leaving aside the fact that the present moon programme is so different from the Apollo programme that the technology and hardware will have to be virtually designed and built from scratch, Getling might like to consider the difference in political climate between then and now.
The Apollo programme was the culmination of a space race. Competition with the Soviet Union and the determination not to be seen to be behind in conquering the new arena of space all but guaranteed NASA unlimited funding. It also prompted great risks to be taken, such as the Apollo 8 circumlunar flight, in which the crew were totally reliant on one engine, with no spare capacity to get them in and out of lunar orbit. All subsequent flights to the moon included a lunar module with its own engines that could, in an emergency, be used for course correction if the main engine failed.
Now NASA has a fraction of the funding it was given during Apollo. The slashing of funds started almost as soon as Neil Armstrong made the first footprint. And NASA is doing much more with its money now, so will have less to spend on manned lunar missions both proportionately and absolutely.
There is no political reason to rush back to the moon, and if anything recent events are likely to result in demands for space travel to be sidelined, if not entirely abandoned, in favour of domestic issues perceived as more immediately important. Finally, it is highly unlikely that NASA would now condone the level of risk that was involved in Apollo.
NASA is no longer part of a race to get to space, so it can afford to be a bit more leisurely this time round.
Bury the lot of them
In the article on carbon sequestration, Emma Young writes that separating the carbon dioxide from the other waste produced by coal-fired power plants is prohibitively expensive and a barrier to sequestration (3 September, p 34). If this is true, then why bother to separate it? Why not sequester all the flue gases 鈥� CO2, nitrogen and assorted impurities?
Not so Fibonacci
Gael Mariani and Martin Scott perpetuate a series of myths in their letter about Fibonacci numbers in nature (3 September, p 19). It is true that the Fibonacci numbers are associated with a particular kind of spiral 鈥� the logarithmic spiral 鈥� and they are also closely associated with the “golden number”, which is roughly 1.6. And the nautilus shell does have the form of a logarithmic spiral.
Unfortunately the correlation ends there, because there are many different logarithmic spirals. In such spirals the space between consecutive windings grows exponentially at a fixed rate, and this rate can be any positive number. The usual “Fibonacci” spiral has a growth rate of about 6.8 鈥� the fourth power of the golden number 鈥� whereas that of the nautilus is about 3, meaning it is too tightly wound to be related to Fibonacci. This growth rate is different in different gastropod species.
The spirals in horns have even less to do with Fibonacci. The connection with elephant tusks is pretty much non-existent. The spirals of galaxies are not even logarithmic. In particular, most have two arms winding from the centre, whereas the logarithmic spiral has a single arm.
The connection between Fibonacci numbers, certain spirals, the golden number and the structure of many plants is genuine and increasingly well understood. Most other alleged occurrences of Fibonacci in nature are bogus.
Distracted meditation
There is an obvious flaw in the article on meditation, the conclusion of which is embodied in the headline “If meditation is good, God makes it better” (3 September, p 9). The study contrasted the outcome of meditating while concentrating on phrases such as “God is love” or “God is peace” with meditating while concentrating on phrases such as “I am happy” or “I am joyful”. God is not the only factor that is different here.
The first set of phrases is generic. “God is love” will be considered true by almost all who believe in God and meaningless by most of those who don’t. “I am happy” and “I am joyful”, by contrast, are specific statements that may or may not be true, and invite evaluation, which will distract from the meditation, especially if not true.
Previous studies reported in New 杏吧原创 have suggested that meditation “switches off” parts of the brain associated with a sense of identity, resulting in a sense of “oneness with the universe”. If this is true, having subjects focus on “I” or “me” phrases may switch these parts back on, and decrease the effectiveness of the meditation. A more telling test might have been to compare “God is peace” with the simple mantra, “Peace”.
From Elizabeth Matka
While I don’t consider myself religious, I’m not surprised that meditating on “God is love” has a better effect than “I am happy” (3 September, p 9). As I understand it, the point of meditation is to take one’s mind off the self referent 鈥� the ego, or whatever you want to call it.
Repeating “I am happy” is hardly going to do that. A phrase that encompasses the human need to feel safe and enveloped — and maybe “God” is the name humans give to that need — seems intuitively likely to be more calming and sustaining than focusing on the self.
Birmingham, UK
From Nick Philpott
I thought it strange that no one had commented on whether meditating that someone else loves you does more for one’s state of relaxation and contentment than endless self reflection. It seems hasty to assume that it is because these people were thinking of God that any extra benefit was received. Perhaps there should be another study with people meditating on the fact that they have a loving family or partner who cares deeply for them.
Norwich, Norfolk, UK