For the record
鈥� Several readers were puzzled by our somewhat confusing reference to “grasses containing carbon 4” in the story on plants in Tibet (8 April, p 20). Plants photosynthesise using one of two pathways, known as C3 and C4. The designations have nothing to do with atomic weight. C3 plants discriminate more against the heavy carbon-13 isotope, which is how the two pathways can be distinguished. In the Tibet study, the animals dined on grasses that used the C4 photosynthetic pathway, and these plants can only grow in warm climates.
鈥� The birds illustrating our story on bird flu in the UK (15 April, p 12), which we implied were ducks, are in fact white-fronted geese.
鈥� Emperor Claudius was treated by Scribonius Largus in AD 48, not 48 BC as we stated in the feature “Electrify your mind” (15 April, p 34). As a number of readers reminded us, the Roman Empire did not exist in 48 BC.
"Obsolete" cellphones
According to my local purveyor of mobile telephones, one of the reasons that the Nokia 6310 is still so popular is that many older fleet cars are fitted with hands-free kits specific to the 6310 (Feedback, 8 April). It is cheaper to buy a “new old” handset than to install a hands-free kit for a different telephone.
From Tom Frazier
I can tell you that Nokia and other phone companies actively resist making the phone that all mature business people say they want: big, with big buttons for men’s fingers, big screen for old eyes to read on a bright day, long battery life, powerful transmitter for weak or crowded areas and a loud earpiece for noisy areas. A plus would be two SIM cards and transmitters so that you could receive on one line, and call out on another. No camera, which is a security problem for military locations.
I have written to them all 鈥� to no effect.
Munich, Germany
Stealing time
Idan Ben-Barak and his company In My Time Corp is typical of the impact of globalisation on the local time markets (Feedback, 1 April). But this is not the only issue facing the average consumer. There is the rising problem of theft and counterfeiting.
Ever wondered where time goes? Ever said to yourself “heavens, where’s the day gone”? It has probably been stolen. Most quality days are stolen to order for those who can afford it. Many others are targeted by eastern European gangs who sell them in bulk to dealers in Asia where they are recycled in sweatshops. It wouldn’t be economical to do it here in Europe, what with EU regulations and all. Out there they’ll pull days apart into their component hours without even the proper eye protection. The workers will inhale any number of seconds due to inadequate ventilation and no breathing apparatus.
Another problem is cloning. Ever had the feeling that every day is like a Monday? D茅j脿 vu at work? Well it probably is: it’s not uncommon for your Monday to be cloned, and for you to relive it on Tuesday and Wednesday, while some wealthy businessman has access to your real Tuesday and Wednesday.
When will the government wake up and do something about this pernicious trade?
Evolution assumption
I am embarrassed to report the response of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to a funding application by Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal, who wanted to study the effects of the popularisation of intelligent design on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policy-makers.
The application was turned down. One of the reasons the committee gave for rejecting it was that it felt there was inadequate justification for “the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct”.
It seems Alters already has one answer to the question he is trying to investigate.
Do as I do
Infants are not the only ones who imitate others (1 April, p 42). Children whose behaviour is imitated by adults are in turn more likely to imitate the behaviours shown by those adults than are children whose own behaviour is not imitated by adults.
This explains why adults goo-goo and gah-gah at infants in response to utterances of the same kind. We are imitating them so that they, in turn, will imitate us. This vicarious learning enables human infants and young children to learn many tasks more effectively than if they had to experiment for themselves (as our chimp cousins do), with clear evolutionary advantages.
Seeing an adult imitating what it has done provides an infant with valuable and pleasant social attention. To obtain that attention again, infants behave as they did in the first place: they look at us, smile and imitate our vocal utterances, just as we did to them.
Parents, imitate your child and they will learn to behave as you do! Of course, this can be a mixed blessing for those parents who find themselves saying to their teenagers, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say!”
Fixing eco-footprints
Are we supposed to believe that a millionaire with a town house in London, a villa in the Caribbean and a shooting estate in Scotland has a lower “ecological footprint” than an impoverished pensioner living in an inner-city tower block? This would appear to be the implication of the “biocapacity model” for assessing national ecological footprints (8 April, p 8).
In reality, the developed countries suck in resources from far beyond their own territories. In particular, there would seem to be little justification for basing the assessment of a country’s fair share of global greenhouse gas emissions on its land area. Per capita assessments of ecological footprints are not only fairer but also a more realistic measure on which to base targets for improvement.
From Eric Kvaalen
In your article on basing the ecological footprint of countries on the excess area they require to sustain them, rather than their population, you write: “There would, however, be huge anger at the unfairness of suggesting that, for instance, the US and Bangladesh were equally to blame for global warming.”
And yet, perhaps it makes sense that countries should live in accordance with their own resources. The problem in Bangladesh is that it has increased its population many times over in the past few decades. Is it really right to give the same quota of resources to every person who is born, regardless of how many brothers and sisters that person has? That would encourage countries to promote population growth rather than family planning.
La Courneuve, France
Iran under threat
Hossein Derakhshan is no doubt right to say that the Iranian government is manipulating public opinion to justify its nuclear programme (8 April, p 23). It is another matter whether the European Union should respond with its own programme of media manipulation directed at the Iranian public, as Derakhshan suggests.
Such a programme will be a waste of effort unless it takes into account Iran’s geopolitical position. The country is surrounded by US military bases: in Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Diego Garcia, whose population the UK obligingly cleansed.
How many of these bases are nuclear-armed? Certainly, the US Fifth Fleet in and around the Gulf packs a formidable nuclear, as well as conventional, punch.
The US (with British understrappers) engineered regime change in Iran in 1953, overthrowing the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and ushering in a long period of dictatorship.
Iranians might be wrong to see nuclear development as the best way of avoiding the fate of their neighbours Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is not hard to understand why they might see the US as a threat.
Ion traps are trumps
Dan Cho does not mention that researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria have entangled eight ions, yielding a quantum byte (25 March, p 42). This is an important step towards a practical quantum computer, and the method should be scalable. The experiment shows that ion traps are probably the most promising technology for quantum computing.
Cyclists breathe easier
The short article illustrated by a photo of a cyclist wearing a breathing mask and entitled “Masks may not help Londoners’ lungs”, seems to imply that cyclists suffer the most from air pollution (15 April, p 23). In fact, cyclists suffer less than other road users. This appears to be because cyclists breathe more rapidly, and because the air they breathe comes from a higher level than that breathed by people in cars, which is sucked in through vents close to the ground, at the level of the exhaust of the car in front.
Archaeology isn't rubbish
I would like to correct a false impression that crept into Steven Mithen’s review of my book about recent human evolution, Before the Dawn (8 April, p 53).
My archaeologist friends, if I still have any, will be horrified to read Mithen’s statement that I view archaeology as useless for interpreting the human past. I never said any such thing. Rather, I wrote that archaeology was powerless to say anything about the ancestral human population that lived some 50,000 years ago, just before the dispersal from Africa. There are no known sites from that exact period, to the best of my knowledge.
Your reviewer, a distinguished archaeologist and marvellous writer, misquotes the statement on page 3 of my book as referring to ancestral human populations, plural, and from that misreading accuses me of saying all archaeology is useless. Please allow me to assure your readers the book does not make this foolish assumption, whatever its other faults.
Nonhuman feet
I could not help noticing in the article about the “first Americans” that the criteria for determining whether a footprint is human or not would exclude me from the human race (8 April, p 42). The third criterion requires that the lateral toes be shorter than the big toe, yet my second toe is significantly longer than my big toe. Would anyone like to suggest which species I belong to?
The editor writes:
鈥� Failure to meet some of the criteria does not mean a footprint is not human. It just means that you cannot say for sure that it is.
Highs without lows
While getting the pleasures alcohol provides without the downsides, as described in your article, seems like a wonderful concept, I wonder just how realistic an idea it is (15 April, p 18), even if the difficulties of obtaining a licence or finding a drug company to develop it were overcome.
The article says an NMDA antagonist would be included as a second ingredient, apparently ignoring the fact that the psychotropic and hyperlocomotive effects of these drugs (in particular dizoclipine, which was mentioned in the article) make their use in humans impractical. Drug companies have been working on overcoming these effects for more than 40 years and have yet to resolve any of them. Other NMDA antagonists which are well known for these effects include PCP and ketamine.
Antarctica rising
The piece from your issue of 45 years ago, dated 6 April 1961, was entitled “If Antarctica’s ice melts” (8 April, p 19). I am curious about the article’s suggestion that the continental surface of Antarctica will rise once the ice has melted. I don’t recall hearing anything about that recently. Is that still expected to occur, and if so, over what sort of time frame? Has any rise at all been detected thus far? Has much research been done into what the effects would be on sea levels, weather patterns and so forth?
Media hype
Your editorial on disease-mongering argues that “bending the will of politicians, doctors and the public” is at the centre of pharmaceutical companies’ campaigns to sell their drugs (15 April, p 5). Let us not forget that in the middle of all this there are the journalists. All too often, patients bring sensationalist newspaper and magazine clippings to doctors’ surgeries and ask for the new cure for baldness or claim that they have restless leg syndrome and would like to have treatment. The media seem to have become the willing handmaidens of the pharmaceutical industry.
An article in PLoS Medicine on disease-mongering analysed 33 newspaper articles on restless leg syndrome that were published after a high-profile campaign launched by GlaxoSmithKline (). The company markets ropinirole, claimed to be the first and only treatment for RLS. The main finding was that journalists in these newspaper articles overstated the benefits of treatment and accepted high estimates of prevalence of the “disease”, without analysing the evidence for these claims in any detail. The study concluded that medical reporting lacks a healthy dose of scepticism.
The medical dictum “do no harm” should apply not only to doctors who prescribe these drugs, but also to the journalism profession as well, especially when it is dealing with corporate pharmaceutical giants intent on making large profits.
Martin Scott and Gael
Mariani, Dogs Monthly magazine
Your readers may be interested to know that disease-mongering has crept across into the field of animal, especially canine, behaviour therapy. This was once mostly the domain of dog trainers but is now one in which vets and animal behaviourists can make a tidy profit by putting dogs on drugs such as diazepam and fluoxetine (Prozac), to name just two favourites.
Common dog behaviour problems such as separation anxiety 鈥� the normal, easily avoided response of a highly social animal that is neglected or left alone for long periods 鈥� are being reclassified as psychiatric diseases for which drugs are frequently recommended as the only treatment. Some drugs, such as clomipramine, now even come in tasty beef-flavour pills to appeal to dogs.
Very few psychotropic drugs have been trialled to assess their suitability for this purpose. To make matters worse, our investigations have suggested that many vets are handing out these drugs like candy without having first carried out the necessary preliminary health tests on the animals.
Blaenycoed, Carmarthenshire, UK