Crop breeding farce
Your article on synthetic wheats suggested that one way to avoid the genetically modified label for new strains was to double the chromosome numbers of infertile triploid plants (three chromosomes) by treating them with the chemical colchicine (11 February, p 8).
I’m afraid that, as someone who has led UK research teams that produced polyploid crop plants by this method and by gene transfer using Agrobacterium bacteria, I very much disagree. More importantly it seems that the European Union does too: in 2001 it defined a genetically modified organism (GMO) as, with the exception of human beings, one in which the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination.
The phenotypic changes brought about by chromosome doubling are often much more radical than any produced by gene transfer. In many cases, any member of the public would be able to distinguish chromosome-doubled plants from their parents.
Consider consumers confronted with a dark-green, larger-headed lettuce with greatly increased numbers of teeth on the leaf margins. Being told “it’s alright, it’s not GM 鈥� it’s just had its chromosomes doubled by applying chemicals”, they would not, I think, be reassured.
It might help to know, however, that a third of Italy’s pasta is made from the Creso variety of durum wheat which came directly from a mutation breeding programme in the 1960s. Under the EU definition of GM that means that the whole of Europe has been consuming GM wheat for decades along with thousands of other crop plant varieties. In other words, the GM crops issue is a complete and utter farce.
Water, water…
One of the many joys of reading New 杏吧原创 is the juxtaposition of articles. “The parched planet”, 25 February, p 33, discussed the huge amount of water required to produce various foods, such as 20,000 litres for 1 kilo of coffee. This was followed by “Green gold” (p 37) that discussed farming algae to produce hydrogen for fuel. The algae would be grown in water-filled tubes on the salt flats of the southern Californian desert.
The obvious question is how many litres of water would be required to produce a litre of hydrogen and where would all this water come from?
A further question that was not addressed is what waste would hydrogen farming produce and how would it be dealt with. This is particularly important as the algae will be genetically modified.
From Hilary Watson
I am somewhat puzzled by the statement on the cover of your 25 February issue that: “It takes 20,000 litres of water to grow 1 kilo of coffee…No wonder the Earth is running dry”.
Surely all that water is not somehow locked up in the kilo of coffee, but has returned to the system? If used for irrigation, some of it must be percolating back down to the aquifer or adding to the streams and rivers in the area, some of it will be evaporating to fall eventually as rain, and a small amount will have been taken up by the plant.
As implied by the old student adage, “You don’t buy beer 鈥� you only rent it”, isn’t water the ultimate recyclable?
Leicester, UK
From Colin Nicholson
How ironic 鈥� your lead article this week concerns the shortage of water in countries where farmers have been sinking wells and over-extracting the groundwater, and the magazine was delivered complete with a request from the charity Oxfam for 拢8 per month to finance the sinking of wells. I trust that Oxfam will be working in areas where the concentration of wells will not worsen the very problems they are trying to solve.
Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK
From Joyce D’Silva, Compassion In World Farming
The plight of water-hungry farmers in India, China and elsewhere poses a massive problem. Thankfully some governments appear to be taking steps to deal with this looming crisis. It is vital that the World Bank and its subsidiary arms add water availability and long-term effects on local water supplies to their criteria for future investment in agricultural projects.
Readers may wonder what action they can take in their own lives to alleviate the situation. It may take some time to get through a kilo of coffee, but a quarter-pounder hamburger 鈥� or its equivalent in straight meat 鈥� can be, and is, consumed daily by millions. Changing to a predominantly plant-based diet is likely to be good for personal health 鈥� and is already recommended by the World Cancer Research Fund 鈥� but will also help reduce this massive global thirst for our most precious resource.
Compassion in World Farming runs a website which sets out all the good reasons for reducing meat consumption, including water use, personal health, food security, environmental pollution and the welfare of farm animals. It also offers guides to positive action.
Petersfield, Hampshire, UK
From Andrew Jamieson
After reading your article on water, I was wondering about the old oil tankers sent to the Indian sub-continent to be scrapped. Could they not be adapted to scoop up “growler” icebergs, which are only the size of a car? The growlers would be stowed in the hold and by the time the ship reaches India the ice would have melted. While the water may not be fit for human consumption, it could be used to irrigate crops. People have thought of using icebergs before, but big ones are impractical. With relatively small ones it is just a matter of the finding the best way of scooping them up.
Preston, Lancashire, UK
Illogical decisions
Robert Matthews raises the notion that a better understanding of risk will win over opponents of incinerators in their communities (18 February, p 24).
Human beings routinely make “illogical” decisions and happily undertake risky activities. We drive cars despite the risk because most of us believe we are better-than-average drivers and can control the risk. On the other hand, people become outraged by seemingly low-risk threats such as incinerators, cellphone radiation or exposure to trace chemicals.
Our decision-making is a complex mixture of logic, data, emotion, fairness and human relationships. We are not robots, and rarely make important decisions on logic and facts alone.
People living next to an incinerator feel powerless to control its operations. They don’t enjoy having it next to them. They can’t make it go away if they choose.
Incinerators and other waste facilities are almost invariably sited in poorer areas where residents are less powerful than those in “better” areas. It is only to be expected that they will feel aggrieved and will oppose new incineration facilities. Their outrage has little to do with precise risk assessments and much to do with a sense of unfairness and other non-logical factors.
By all means let’s understand risks better, but don’t expect it to change community attitudes. If the advocates of incinerators want to do that, they would be better advised to address all the “non-logical” aspects of human behaviour.
Moon with a view
How about showing the full moon when you talk about the full moon? Your report falls into the same trap as numerous others have before it (18 February, p 22). The moon is shown here from a completely different point of view from the one we always have from Earth 鈥� and the “man in the moon” is actually mostly missing from this particular perspective.
The NASA/Corbis picture used here was taken by astronauts during one of the Apollo missions and has already been used 鈥� or rather abused 鈥� countless times by graphics artists who apparently have never looked at the moon with their own eyes. You find wrong “full moons” like this in advertisements, movies and even the occasional science magazine. It is so simple: just look up and see for yourself.
Delta evidence
Jeff Hecht’s article on vanishing deltas draws attention to important concepts regarding the vulnerability of life on river deltas (18 February, p 8). Unfortunately it confuses plausible speculation with actual evidence.
Studies indicate that parts of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta are subsiding naturally at a few millimetres per year, and that land reclamation has adversely affected tidal sedimentation. We take issue, however, with the assertion that pumping out groundwater is actually causing land subsidence.
We have been researching groundwater issues in Bangladesh for nearly 20 years and are aware of no evidence for the very high subsidence rates cited. We are aware of only one study of land subsidence in Bangladesh. That was for Dhaka, which sits on top of the most intensively pumped aquifer in the country: up to 1990 there was no evidence of subsidence. Geologically speaking, we recognise that other parts of Bangladesh are more vulnerable to subsidence because of groundwater withdrawal, but know of no evidence as to whether or not it is actually occurring, nor whether there is a monitoring network that could detect such change.
Health forecast
The principle of health forecasting is indeed exciting (11 February, p 44). But the parameters that have to be taken into consideration are numerous and vary widely by region: high relative atmospheric humidity, for instance, is not common in temperate climates. Furthermore, for many people who are susceptible to one ailment or another, it is the indoor rather than the outdoor environment that may have major effects.
Regarding asthma, we found no association between thunderstorm activity and asthma attacks over an eight-year period in Athens, a typical Mediterranean metropolis.
How hot is normal?
The graphic “The warming world” seems odd (18 February, p 10). The 0 掳C line grazes the highest historic temperatures since the year 800, rather than showing the average. This appears to show that the oft-quoted 0.6 掳C rise relates to those high temperatures rather than the mean. The rise from the mean would be 1.1掳. What’s that about then?
The editor writes:
鈥� The graphic was based on a graph in the Science paper by Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa. It uses as its baseline the average temperature for 1865 to 1995, the period for which there is an instrumental record of temperature. It is merely coincidental that this corresponds to peak temperatures in earlier centuries.
Speaking in time
The article on the 25-hour day was fascinating (4 February, p 34). It would be interesting to see what those researching the perception of time could discover from people who speak languages that handle time very differently from Indo-European languages.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf reported back in 1940 that speakers of different languages conceptualise time in different ways, and claimed this was determined by how their languages refer to time. For example, English speakers quantify time; English has past, present, and future tenses. Hopi speakers, however, prepare things to allow them to come into being so for them the past is an undifferentiated stream that prepares for the present, which prepares for what is coming ahead.
Where teaspoons go
Teaspoons, connected with odd socks or faeries (Feedback, 25 February)? Pah! Or Pshaw! The apparent disappearance of teaspoons has a much simpler explanation. They mutate into dessert spoons. There is never a shortage of dessert spoons 鈥� in fact, we usually use them for stirring tea. Careful observation will reveal the occasional sudden appearance of a dessert spoon in the teaspoon compartment. No intermediate stages in the process are ever observed, which makes this likely to be a quantum phenomenon.
From Peter Byles
I thought it was common knowledge that teaspoons are the pupae of wire coat hangers.
Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Northamptonshire, UK
From Michael Grounds
We three medical students had teaspoons with a half-life of about 30 days. At the end of the year we mentioned this over a cup of tea to the two blokes down the corridor. “That’s odd,” said one, “we’ve had exactly the opposite experience here.”
Strathfieldsaye, Victoria, Australia
From Robert Jackson
The discussion on the nature of teaspoons and Biros has reminded me of a similar discussion that rambled on (some decades ago in the Letters pages of one of your rival science magazines. The topic started in a similar vein 鈥� in this case, where do all the biros go? The conclusion, after some months of correspondence was as follows:
Biros are the larval form of wire coat hangers. A full Biro will sit quite happily on a desk until some environmental trigger causes the Biro to seek a suitable place to pupate. Most Biros seek out wardrobes, and in particular, pockets of seldom used jackets. From here, they emerge as a wire coat hanger. This explanation neatly explains the disappearance of Biros, the multiplication of wire coat hangers in wardrobes, and the presence of empty Biros (the discarded pupa case) in old jackets. Three of life’s mysteries solved with one phenomenon.
Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK
From Perry Bebbington
Feedback’s comments reminded me of the time I spent working in an electronics’ repair workshop in the early 1980s. The workshop manager was always complaining that however many pens he bought, he could never find one, and he could not understand where they all went. May I come clean? Pete, it was me, I took one pen home every Saturday I was in working. Don’t ask why, it just seemed like a bit of fun at the time.
Nottingham, UK
The Matrix choice
You got the message of the pills wrong on your cover of the 18 February issue if you meant to conjure up The Matrix. You have a red pill with “sleep” written on it. But when Morpheus offers the pills to Neo, the blue pill is the one that puts you back to sleep, so you may awaken in the Matrix “believing whatever it is you want to believe”. The red pill is the one that keeps you awake, so you can be shown “just how deep the rabbit hole goes”.
The art editor writes:
鈥� Nice idea, but it was simply a case of red for stop and green for go. The Matrix never crossed our minds when setting up the image.
For the record
鈥� The politically appointed NASA public affairs officer who resigned over fudging his r茅sum茅, after suggestions that he had tried to suppress evidence for global warming, is George Deutsch, not David (25 February, p 7)
鈥� In our report on tropical storm threats to river deltas (18 February, p 8), we misidentified the Chinese river that was dry at the mouth for 230 days in 1998. It is the Yellow river which runs dry, not the Yangtze. The Yellow river delta is less populated and at low risk of typhoons.
Costly hipporoos
I am an enormous admirer of Freeman Dyson. However, I think his reasoning by analogy has missed the mark entirely (11 February, p 36).
Yes, computers have evolved to the point where anyone can design nuclear weapons or novel organisms. But have you ever tried to build a nuclear weapon at home? It is not so easy, since enrichment, reprocessing, fabricating, materials handling, and of course delivery systems are all large industrial operations and likely to remain so.
Genetic manipulation may well have some of the same industrial and capital restrictions. Hipporoos will take a pretty big investment. Genome synthesisers, sterile labs and reproductive technology will probably remain the province of large science or industry.
Additionally, although I think Freeman does a good job on some of the risks involved with this form of biotechnology, he is remiss in not mentioning that one of the first uses for a new technology is almost always to exploit its potential for making new weapons. Finally, if people could use new technology to overcome death, then they surely would and the results would not be as dire, nor as simple as he suggests.