Wind puzzle
Having visited the Ecotech Centre in Swaffham, Norfolk, in eastern England, and climbed the giant wind turbine there, I was somewhat puzzled by the reference to the need to “shut down [wind turbines] … at around 25 metres per second [wind speed] … to protect the drive train and gearbox” in Rowan Hooper’s report on wind power (12 November, p 18).
During our visit we were informed that the major technological innovation that distinguished the Ecotech turbine, and similar devices at Swaffham and on Scroby Sands in the North Sea, is that they dispense with a mechanical gearbox and instead generate electricity by direct induction. It was this breakthrough, we were told, that made the new generation of turbines both more environmentally friendly, thanks to the reduction in sound pollution, and more economically viable than the less efficient earlier turbines with their complex mechanical gearing and long driveshafts. One of the benefits ascribed to the new design was that it largely obviated the need for the operational scenario that Hooper describes.
Rodent arias
I am not surprised at the recent discovery of singing mice (5 November, p 14), but I am amazed that such behaviour has never been reported for rats. I had a pet hooded lab rat over 30 years ago that when kept in a quiet room could be distinctly heard to sing as it went about its business. The sound was quite clear when the rat was happy and close by.
As this was clearly not ultrasonic song, maybe rats would be more convenient subjects for this research.
From Ian Simmons
The discovery that mice sing would have come as no surprise to radio listeners in the late 1930s, when there was a brief vogue for broadcasting their song.
The most famous of these performers was Mickey, the Singing Mouse of Devonport, and its songs were broadcast on American radio in the company of other singing mice from the US and Canada. Mickey’s vocalisations were described as “a soft whirring trill rising into a crescendo, followed by a two-note jump, tapering to a diminuendo”. A Detroit mouse had its song compared to a robin or a tone-deaf canary.
In his magnum opus on singing mice in Fortean Studies (vol 3), Jonathan Downes collects a wide range of singing mouse reports from newspapers and scientific literature going back to the 19th century. These vocalisations were attributed to respiratory afflictions suffered by the mice, although their singing behaviour suggests otherwise: some could keep it up for hours and others carried out energetic exercise while singing.
Your report of Tim Holy and Zhongsheng Guo’s recent research suggests another origin for the singing. Might those mousey singing stars have been making basically the same vocalisations, only dropped from the ultrasonic to be at a low enough frequency to be audible? Do people still encounter audible singing mice today? Downes records none later than the 1940s and I have not encountered any recent reports either.
Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, UK
Begin…nigeb
Paul Dove’s idea that backward-spelled words could be coined for reverse actions (Feedback, 19 November) was used by the authors of the Algol 68 programming language nearly 40 years ago.
Rather than use the IF…END IF and SELECT…END SELECT statements that other languages use, they went for IF…FI and CASE…ESAC statements.
It always struck me as disappointing that they did not follow this approach to its proper conclusion. Clauses still used BEGIN…END rather than the more logical BEGIN…NIGEB.
From Mark Swingler
Has Dove not heard of the unit of electrical conductance: the mho?
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
Left-handed, right-eyed
David Wolman deals with handedness as if it is entirely self-contained (5 November, p 36). It is not. A person’s handedness is strongly influenced by accommodation or adaptation to the environment in which he or she exists.
There is also internal accommodation to the rest of the body. Probably the biggest influence here is “eyedness”. (To determine eyedness, ask a person to look at an object through a tube and note which eye they use.) In my case I am left-handed but right-eyed. So when I fire a rifle, for instance, I have to choose between my eyedness, which requires that I should operate right-handed, or my left-handedness. In fact I shoot right-handed. This type of accommodation contributes to making me more “mixed-handed” than I would otherwise be.
There is also external accommodation to the world around us. Many of the items we use and situations we encounter are set up for right-handed people, and to use them we lefties must adapt in one way or another. An example is a pair of scissors: they just do not cut well if we try to use them with the left hand, so most lefties just learn to use scissors with the right hand.
The world around us contributes much to the “mixed-handedness” of left-handed people, but negligibly to those who are right-handed.
For the record
鈥� In the story about IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer (19 November, p 27), we said the machine “now runs at 280,000 billion floating point operations (teraflops) per second”. In fact a teraflops (not a teraflop) is a trillion floating point operations per second, so BlueGene/L runs at 280 teraflops 鈥� and not teraflops per second, since the “per second” is taken care of by the “s” in teraflops. Finally, we should have said that no competitor to BlueGene has yet broken the 100 teraflops barrier, not the 100,000 teraflops barrier.
Evolutionary ethics
I read the article about the Dover court case with much interest (29 October, p 6). As a student in a British school I couldn’t help wondering why a teaching policy similar to the one I know is not adopted. The theories of where we came from are not taught to us in religious studies or science, but in philosophy and ethics.
This puts ideas generally believed to be incompatible with each other into one subject with a much broader idea base. I was taught neither creationism nor intelligent design nor evolution in biology or religious studies. They were covered in philosophy and ethics, along with many other controversial issues. We were also taught ways in which the theories could be linked into each other: for example, some people may believe in evolution but say that God triggered the big bang.
I agree that students should be taught a variety of views when there is more than one idea and none can be 100 per cent proven. However, to change the basis of science to allow intelligent design just seems wrong.
From Father Bryan Storey, Tintagel Catholic Church
Your correspondent Iain Banks says that faith-based people have evolved in their argument from “creationism” to “intelligent design” (19 November, p 24). Can we look forward to a similar evolution among atheists from “no god” to “explanation”?
Tintagel, Cornwall, UK
Fusion fallacies
I am continually astounded at the positive press generated by the promoters of nuclear fusion energy, and in particular about its supposed availability, which is always just a few decades in the future (12 November, p 52).
Nobody knows how to contain a fusion reactor. We do know that fusion would leave reactor materials radioactive, but nobody knows how to replace the materials when necessary, or how to dispose of those that have been replaced. Nobody even imagines that the first reactor will be operating any time before 2048.
If the issue were not so serious, it would be a joke that some of the world’s wealthiest governments are supporting fusion as their best chance for a reliable energy supply. Even if the technical problems could be solved in the proposed timescale, nuclear fission’s failure to solve its own waste problems indicates that fusion is unlikely to solve the same problem at any useful time in the future.
The world should not be treated as a big lab for these big boys to have fun experiments in. We are playing with real climates, real societies and real people. Renewable energy technologies already work: what is needed is the political will to implement them immediately. That will is undermined by the false promises of nuclear fusion.
From Paul Lloyd
I was enjoying reading about nuclear fusion when a phrase leapt off the page at me: “leaving it [the reactor structure] radioactive for decades”. And there I was thinking this was supposed to be the “clean” kind of nuclear reactor.
How much of “it” will there be, and how does it compare with the waste produced by a fission reactor? How will it be treated, and disposed of? People need to know these things before their governments spend billions on something that might not even work.
Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, UK
The editor writes:
鈥� Fusion researchers admit that the materials surrounding the fusion reactor will become radioactive, but there are two important differences from today’s nuclear power stations. Calculations suggest that the fusion reactor will be only about one-tenth as radioactive as spent uranium fuel rods. Also, the radioisotopes created by fusion are expected to have much shorter half-lives. The radioactivity of a fusion reactor is predicted to drop by a factor of 10,000 within 100 years, compared to a factor of 5 for a conventional nuclear power plant.
Biofuel footprint
Fred Pearce highlights the disastrous effect on tropical rainforests of the developed world’s demand for biofuels (19 November, p 19). However, even a home-grown UK biofuels industry would have a large carbon footprint.
This would come from the 6 tonnes of greenhouse gas per tonne of fertiliser produced in order to grow the fuel crops, and from increasing “food miles” to hundreds of millions of kilometres as a result of trucks ferrying crops to processing plants.
The UK government’s rush to biofuels 鈥� promising a 2000 per cent increase at the pumps within five years 鈥� falls between a rock and hard place. Imported biofuels have high carbon transport costs and an environmental impact in the developing world. If we import less, a highly intensive native industry will be required, with its own environmental penalties.
The Department for Transport’s feasibility study admits that the carbon costs of biofuels are extremely variable and states “whilst all biofuels will lead to carbon savings in the transport sector, some, and in extreme cases all, of the emissions will be displaced to other sectors (such as agriculture and industrial manufacturing)”. We need a regulatory framework to make sure that the fuels are sourced from processes designed to achieve the greatest savings in carbon emissions.
Tracking bird flu
Your map showing the H5N1 outbreaks in birds in China also states that wild birds spread the virus across Russia and on to Europe (12 November, p 21). Do you have unequivocal evidence of this? Birds fly, but they can also be carried by humans. It just so happens that a railway line runs from Lanzhou near Qinghai Lake in a north-westerly direction to Kazakhstan and on to Omsk in Russia, where outbreaks have occurred. Is it not equally possible that it is human traffic in birds that is spreading this disease?
Debora MacKenzie writes:
鈥� At first sight, this does look plausible. But the Trans-Siberian railway route is also where the people, the poultry and the monitoring stations are, so of course that’s where the tracked outbreaks were. The Trans-Siberian does not, however, run to north-west Turkey, or the Black Sea coast of Romania, or Croatia. More importantly, every sequence found along that route was one previously found in wild birds, not the south-east Asian poultry sequence. If H5N1 were spreading by human agency, such as poultry being sold along the railway, it should have been the poultry sequence, but it wasn’t.
Monty Python's lemur
I was really touched, and indeed, honoured (a clich茅, but it’s true), when Urs Thalmann told me they would like to name the lemur after me (12 November, p 6).
I’m absurdly fond of the little creatures, and if I had to show any of my programmes to St Peter upon my arrival at the Pearly Gates, I think I would show him my documentary made about them in Madagascar. I help with conservation a bit, here and there, and so will redouble my efforts for our furry friends.
Bad gene food
The article on food changing genes “for life” talks optimistically about using this to change our behaviour by ingestion of designed substances. But curiously, it avoids talking about the possibility of damage caused by eating the unnatural compounds that we are immersed in today (19 November, p 12). Particular industrial chemicals may or may not cause cancer. But if they happen to make our offspring stupid and lazy too, how will they ever find out?