In Every Street
I used to work in local government in northern England. One day my boss took me on a visit to Every Street, at that time a rather depressed and deserted part of industrial Manchester (Feedback, 25 February).
He pointed out that, though it had no shops or pubs, the street had a public convenience. He said that one of the city councillors had insisted it should be erected there, so that he could claim in his next election address that “due to my efforts there is now a public toilet in Every Street in Manchester”. My boss offered this as a lesson in the futility of seeking logical explanations of urban development.
From Will Lawson
Until recently there was a pub at Egginton, Derbyshire, called “The Every Arms”. “Every” was the family name of the residents of the local hall, and the family’s arms were depicted on the sign. The local phone directory has two entries under the name Every, both of them knights.
I would suggest that the street names quoted in Feedback derive similarly from a surname.
Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK
From Albie Benson
In Dunedin, New Zealand, we also have an Every Street. Dave Henry, a retired bank manager of Dunedin, grew so tired of hearing the joke he literally walked “every” street in Dunedin (population 120,000). I believe that it was part of a fitness/weight-loss programme.
Dunedin, New Zealand
For the record
鈥� Our article on dinosaur investigations said that while bird wings have evolved to typically have three finger bones, “dinosaurs generally had six fingers on each hand”. This should have read “five fingers on each hand” (25 February, p 28). The article also stated that geological scientist Timothy Rowe is at the “University of Austin in Texas”. This should have been “the University of Texas in Austin”.
鈥� Wine was discovered around 1600 years after Tutankhamen died, not 3000 years after as we suggested in our 18 February issue, p 22.
鈥� In the story about a vaccine for multiple sclerosis (11 March, p 12), the name of David McWilliams of PharmaFrontiers was incorrectly spelt McMillan.
Nameless girls
Talking of things that have no name (Feedback, 11 February), Anamika (A + Namika) means “without name” in Hindi/Sanskrit and is a fairly common name for girls. It is also the word for the ring finger in India.
From John Waring
A village called No Place certainly does exist in north-east England. If you follow the “Place names” link on David Simpson’s , you will understand why it can’t be found on the Ordnance Survey map.
“No Place, County Durham. There’s no place like home, particularly if home happens to be No Place. The name of this hamlet half way between Beamish and Stanley originally referred to four long since demolished cottages, but how they got their name is a matter of dispute. One view is that the houses stood on a boundary between two parishes and that neither parish would accept responsibility for them.
“Another theory is that the name was once Nigh Place or Near Place and has been shortened to its present form. In 1983 signs were erected renaming the hamlet Co-operative Villas, (Ordnance survey reference NZ 217 533), but the angry No Placers protested and it soon regained its old name on the signpost, although Co-operative Villas still remains on the signpost as an option.”
Incidentally, New York is not very far away, 12 miles from No Place, Washington only 6 miles, Quebec, 6 miles. Other interesting villages in north-east England are Boosbeck, Pity Me, and to cap it all, Crackpot.
Redcar, Cleveland, UK
From Michael Stone
You may have finally banished streets with no name but how about “enlightening” streets? There is one in Bristol, UK, where I live. It is called “There and Back Again Lane” and guess what 鈥� it is a cul-de-sac.
It has regularly lost its street sign to many generations of university students. There is a photo at .
Bristol, UK
Cosmos will survive
Valerie Jamieson believes that postponing NASA’s cosmology programme “could have devastating consequences for our understanding of the cosmos” (25 February, p 23).
I decline to be devastated by the idea. The cosmos has been there for a long time and the chances are that it will survive for later study even if NASA’s plans are delayed for a couple of hundred years. I would be much happier if the money and effort from that programme were devoted to ensuring that we will still be here in a couple of hundred years.
It's raining blood
I’m surprised that neither your article nor the original paper suggest a fairly obvious explanation for the red rain that fell over Kerala in India (4 March, p 34). If indeed the link between the red rains and a meteorite can be proven, then it has been known for a while that organic compounds in meteorites can form vesicles that look like cells when they interact with water.
This phenomenon is mentioned with regard to the Murchison meteorite on NASA’s website: . It is also mentioned in an interview with a co-investigator for the Stardust mission, referring to interstellar ice: .
Although I can’t find the references, I seem to remember that vesicles obtained by similar processes can be made to “replicate” under certain circumstances.
From Martin Pitt, University of Sheffield
To a microbiologist, the particles in the red rain may look superficially like red blood cells, but to a chemical engineer they look like liposomes or microcapsules. These are bubbles of oil which can spontaneously trap aqueous material. They are typically spherical when formed, but may partially collapse with change of temperature and/or pressure. The activity that the researchers observed in cedar wood oil at 300 掳C may be rearrangement of material rather than reproduction.
There are many known methods of formation, and more to be discovered, but I would suggest that a source of oil mist or smoke has condensed on particles of ice and dust, which could even be meteoric in origin. One possible source would be a ship burning red oil in the Arabian Sea. The reported sonic boom could have been the rupture of an aircraft oil tank, a military cargo plane with 50 tonnes of hydraulic oil, perhaps, though the length of time the red rain continued suggests a longer release. The absorption spectrum is not that of haemoglobin, but is feasible for an iron complex precipitating at a surface.
Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK
From Kevin Gardner
Rhodophyceae “red” algae are a likely cause of Hazel Muir’s red rain. The description and the low resolution of the cell photo points in particular to a Porphyridium species, such as is commonly seen in bird baths where soluble salts collect.
It can form mucilaginous masses resembling drops of blood or even tomato sauce at times of population explosions. It is an alga that is open to desiccation, which is when its distribution and survival mechanism kicks in.
West Huntspill, Somerset, UK
From Rachel Cave, National University of Ireland
If the material creating the red rain in Kerala turns out to be mammalian blood, there is no need to invoke exploding bats to find a source for it. It was commonplace in my childhood in Ireland for slaughterhouses to dump their effluent into nearby watercourses and I wonder if the same practice goes on in India today. All that is then needed to provide downpours of blood in rainfall over succeeding days is a tornado of the kind that empties water bodies of their fish or frogs along with the water.
I do hope it turns out to be alien life forms after all, though.
Galway, Republic of Ireland
From Ian Simmons
Godfrey Louis’s paper on the Kerala red rain will not be the first time the organic nature of such falls has been considered in the scientific press. Charles Fort, in his Book of the Damned (1919), summarises quite a variety of red rains, mostly culled from the scientific press. In the on-line version () Fort scholar “Mr X” (his real name) gives the references for all the cases Fort refers to, many of them from reputable journals including Nature.
A number of the reports Fort cites involve the fall persisting over one area for several days, being preceded by loud “thunderclaps” and on occasions being accompanied by falls of “slag” that may be of meteoric origin.
Also, in the early days of London’s Royal Society, its collection included a sample of a “rain of blood” collected in the Isle of Wight by Sir John Oglander. It is unfortunately now lost.
Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, UK
Strung together
Is it possible that the most intuitive explanation for quantum entanglement or “spooky action at a distance” is simply that what we see as separate but entangled objects are in fact a single entity, joined at the hip in an unobserved dimension? As Paul Wesson points out (11 February, p 32), the concept of higher dimensions has been given serious consideration by physicists since at least the 1920s, and more recently string theorists have postulated extravagant numbers of dimensions.
A fifth dimension as an explanation of entanglement is far too obvious to have been overlooked by Einstein or any other 20th-century physicist, but I have never seen the suggestion addressed, much less dismissed. I assume the maths just doesn’t work out, but to a layman this doesn’t seem to be any goofier an idea than much else in modern physics. What’s wrong with this intuition?
No little Frankensteins
Freeman Dyson seems to have worried a lot of people by comparing biotech to computers and assuming that it will therefore soon be in the hands of children (11 February, p 36). How many children’s games involve the design and printing of microchips and then construction and programming of a computer?
The products of both technologies may end up as common household goods but it seems unlikely that biotech production will ever leave the hands of (supposedly) responsible adults.
No hipporoos just yet then.
Seaweed solution
I found your article on reducing drag by pumping a layer of air between a ship’s hull and the water stimulating (18 February, p 46). Presumably this technique might also reduce the amount of fouling from barnacles and seaweed which a hull attracts, further improving its streamlining and enabling ship owners to use less anti-fouling paint. In this way chemical pollution might be reduced, but perhaps at the expense of increased underwater noise pollution, with the “bubble” ship giving off high-pitched hissing and whistling noises to the discomfort of whales.
If a new organic surfactant could be developed from some kind of seaweed or lichen, it might be possible to reduce the turbulence in the boundary layer and help hold the bubble envelope in place around the hull. This would be preferable to pumping slippery polymers out of the hull into the water: I don’t like the idea of a supertanker leaving a trail like a snail.
No food for thought
Researchers have apparently just discovered that hunger improves learning and memory (25 February, p 12). I’ve been doing this routinely for years. I see the phenomenon as the opposite of “food coma”.
Contrary to received wisdom, I almost never eat breakfast during the week, as it slows me down quite noticeably, and I time my meals to give me the maximum recovery period before I will need the use of my brain again. Often I hardly eat at all during the week, or have little food except in the evenings.
My body is quite used to this. I hardly even feel hungry any more on weekdays, but if low blood sugar starts to make me trembly, I find that applying a bit of coffee to the problem usually helps. Come the weekend however, I am feeling ravenous, and can eat like a horse.
I believe I inherited these dietary habits in large part from my father. Only on reading your article did it dawn on me how eccentric this probably is. Still, it works well for me. I always feel alert and sharp, and don’t get drowsy or inattentive even in the most boring situations.
Pink dinosaurs
Your two dinosaur articles were excellent (25 February, p 28 and p 44). But why are dinosaurs in so many publications and films always pictured as green or brown? Is there actually any proof that dinosaurs were various shades of brown, green and grey?
Maybe some dinosaurs were bright pink or fluorescent orange or had myriad spots and stripes of vivid colours and so were easy for predators to spot.
Where does water go?
Reading Fred Pearce’s important article on our “parched planet”, I could not escape the thought that there seemed to be something missing (25 February, p 32): if the subterranean water is being over-exploited, is it really lost? Where does it ultimately go?
The answer surely is that it still belongs to planet Earth, even if it passes through crops and is redistributed by being transported far away. What does not return to the deep water table ends up in the atmosphere and should increase the rainfall somewhere else. It may well result in “a one-way trip to disaster” in some regions, but the planet is not being parched in toto. Earth’s total amount of water remains unchanged.
There is no immediate solution to the water deprivation of some areas, but in the longer term the water should be recycled, redistributed or retained to meet irrigation and other needs, wherever they are greatest. The solution is a challenge to modern economies, where the necessary wealth and technologies are available.
From Phil Munnelly
The choice of a quarter pounder as a unit of beef masked the fact that beef production is by far the greatest user of water, litre for kilo. There are 8.8 quarter pounders in a kilo, making 96,000 litres of water per kilo.
That compares unfavourably with the 56,000 litres to make a kilo of cotton and 20,000 litres to make a kilo of coffee. At 5000 litres a kilo, cheese and rice start to look like relatively attractive food sources.
Canberra, ACT, Australia
From Geoff Wilson, Aquaponics Network Australia
Your report on the world’s profligate water use for food production failed to mention the promise of aquaponics, in which recirculation aquaculture combines with intensive horticulture to allow food to be produced with miserly use of water.
Aquaculture wastes become the nutrients for organic hydroponics 鈥� growing crops on gravel or sand without the use of soil. Hence the term “aquaponics”.
Recent economic analysis by the Aquaponics Network Australia has shown aquaponics to be the world’s most productive food system in terms of efficient water use.
Depending on where it is practised, much aquaponics takes only about half the volume of water to produce $100 worth of food in the form of fresh fish and vegetables or fruit compared with its closest rival, inorganic hydroponics, which relies on chemical fertilisers. Inorganic hydroponics is the only close contender for the title of “World’s most miserly water user for food production”.
Holland Park, Queensland, Australia
From John Passioura
The numbers Pearce quotes for the volumes of water required to grow various agricultural products are but a half truth. They apply only for produce grown entirely with irrigation water.
A much sounder gauge of agricultural water consumption is the extra water 鈥� the water not provided by rains 鈥� used by growing a crop or grazing rangelands. In dryland agriculture or in grazed rangelands this extra is essentially zero 鈥� that is, the amount of the annual rainfall that returns to the atmosphere by evaporation, whether directly from the soil or via transpiring plants, is unaffected by whether or not you grow a crop or graze the rangelands.
This is not to say that Pearce’s concerns over falling watertables in India and other similarly situated countries are misplaced. They are indeed serious. But human adaptability is such that the boundary between irrigated and unirrigated land is starting to blur as irrigation water becomes ever scarcer and farmers turn increasingly to partial irrigation at the most effective times, rather than full irrigation. This blurring is best guided by thinking about water productivity as the extra yield that comes from a given increase in water supply.
Turner, ACT, Australia
From Stefan Farr
Instead of relying only on clouds to replenish underground supplies in time to save the crops, perhaps scientists could develop more efficient irrigation systems. Pipes could be buried underground, for example, to let water infiltrate from within instead of being sprayed. A more advanced scheme would be to separate the upper layer of the soil with very thin biodegradable plastic, reducing water evaporation from the ground even further. Small grains such as wheat could be planted in sheets of plastic with their upper part partially or completely waterproof. The plant could grow through the plastic, with its roots underneath having access to the water-rich soil.
Cluj, Romania
From Ian Vallance
Can anyone explain to me why mass desalination is not the solution to all water shortages anywhere? To me it is simply insane that we exert a massive effort drilling deep into the ground in search of a limited resource, and then consume massive amounts of power pumping the water up, when there are limitless supplies of water in our oceans. Couple human ingenuity, capitalism and a wee bit of joined-up thinking by politicos and I have no doubt that mass desalination and subsequent intelligent distribution would mean that farmers everywhere could abandon their wells and let the aquifers refill.
York, UK
From Geoff Richardson
In using water we merely change its location. There will always be enough water on Earth for our purposes, we just need to be smarter in how we utilise, recycle, store and distribute it.
Glen Iris, Victoria, Australia