Just a scorpion
Ancient Americans may well have noticed the supernova of 1006 (10 June, p 7). With clear skies and no street lights it is quite likely. But a rock painting showing a star and a scorpion is no evidence of this. The constellation Scorpius is a conventional label, laden with Indo-European history and assumptions and actually looking not much like either the rock drawing of a scorpion shown or the creature itself. Personally, I think the constellation looks more like a kangaroo.
A star map would have been evidence. A picture of a star and a scorpion is, however, just that. Whatever it meant to the Native Americans, it did not mean they shared the peculiar naming conventions of the Babylonians, read their horoscopes, or did anything else that would make a scattered collection of stars mean “scorpion” to us.
From Mick Swithinbank
The shapes perceived in the stars are notoriously arbitrary and tradition-dependent. For example, what the Europeans and nearby peoples before them saw as Leo was interpreted by a South American tribe as a lobster, with several of the stars at the tail end disregarded. In New Zealand, the Maori regarded Scorpius as a fish hook. Native Americans would have needed contact with the Old World in order to acquire the scorpion tradition.
Bereldange, Luxembourg
The dome builders
The inverted catenary described in your article about building domes does not wholly solve the problem (10 June, p 42). When holding up a dome, the walls of a conventional building can only support the vertical components of the load. Today a steel ring, in tension, might contain the horizontal components, but the Gothic builders had only buttresses, did they not?
Sequestration risks
Many people seem happy with the idea of storing carbon dioxide from power stations in depleted oil and gas fields. It’s a risky undertaking in my opinion.
Proponents of this option tell us that these fields have held oil and gas for many millions of years, so holding CO2 for millions more years won’t be a problem. But geological stability only existed in these places before drillers sunk tens or hundreds of exploration and production wells through impermeable strata into each field. Carbon storage would rely on plugged and abandoned wells remaining sealed forever.
The joint between plug and rock will always be a weak point. Moreover, the extraction of fossil fuels reduces pressure in a field, contrasting with the high pressures that had existed for geological timespans. What effect will pressure cycling have on the future geological integrity of these formations 鈥� even without the effects of oil producers having deliberately fractured formations and injected fluids into them to extract as much oil as possible?
Finally, many oil and gas reserves are underlain by water. In fact, large amounts of water will eventually make these fields uneconomic. CO2 will readily dissolve in any water present to form carbonic acid. This is both good and bad. The good part is that carbonic acid may react with rock to form insoluble carbonates, thereby locking up some CO2 forever. The bad part is that the acid may also weaken well plugs and any other vulnerable points in the formation.
Leakage of CO2 back into the atmosphere over many thousands of years is virtually inevitable.
Flood of floppies
In the article on the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, Stuart Clark states that Viktor Toth wrote a program to extract 40 gigabytes of data from the Pioneer space probes from old floppy discs and record it onto DVDs (3 June, p 46). Forty gigabytes of data from floppies? At 1.44 megabytes per floppy, that would seem to be a staggering 28,000-plus discs.
However, according to Toth the discs in question were actually magneto-optical, with 120-megabyte capacity, also known as “flopticals”. So there were just a few hundred of them 鈥� a much more manageable task. Toth’s main contribution has been to write reams of code to extract data from the files and do some real analysis.
Nothing new for me
Your article on neophilia 鈥� the love of the new 鈥� made for interesting reading (10 June, p 52). I am 27 and can recall a fairly well-defined point a couple of years back when my neophilia evaporated. I suddenly realised that I didn’t need a mobile phone that took pictures, played MP3s and browsed the internet. My laptop, while a little slower than the latest models, works just fine. I have enough decent clothes without needing to replace them all with more fashionable ones on a regular basis. What I battle with now is convincing those close to me that I am not a freak. Thanks for clearing that up, at least in my own mind.
From Harry Barnes
Any neophiliac in the UK who purchases a fresh mobile phone each time a new model comes out can stop feeling guilt about discarding their old models. Just send unwanted mobiles (along with their chargers) to the TUC Aid Iraq appeal at Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS.
The mobiles and chargers will be sent out to the million-strong and officially recognised Iraqi trade union movement, who will convert them for use in Iraq. This will help a movement dedicated to peace, solidarity and democracy.
In a consumerist society we all suffer from neophilia to some degree, so we can all unite on this one. We have nothing to lose.
Dronfield, Derbyshire, UK
Ravishing rainbows
I am sure I have twice seen a rainbow similar to a circumhorizontal arc in England (17 June, p 17). On both occasions it was just before dawn with a high-contrast spectrum rainbow high in the sky between me and the rising sun. The first time, offshore in summer, the sky was clear apart from a few high-altitude wisps of cloud. On the second it appeared through a large gap in the winter clouds. Unlike your photo, my rainbow covered only a few degrees horizontally 鈥� nonetheless, it was still spectacular.
For the record
鈥� In the review of Vietnam: A natural history, we wrongly stated that the authors of the book are at the Smithsonian Institute (10 June, p 52). They are in fact at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
No need for monkeys
The Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust’s claim that “many medical advances would have been impossible without experiments on monkeys” is simply not true (10 June, p 6). Their new report states that benefits that have arisen from primate research include the polio vaccine and treatments for stroke and Parkinson’s disease, although not a single reference is provided to support those claims.
In contrast, a review of primate research by Europeans for Medical Progress, which opposes animal testing, cites almost 100 references and asserts that monkey experiments delayed the polio vaccine and failed to produce a single successful treatment for stroke (). Deep-brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease is, in fact, a triumph of human clinical observation, not primate experimentation, as was described in your own pages two years ago (New 杏吧原创, 24 July 2004, p 40).
There are serious scientific objections to primate experimentation, the track record of which is in our view abysmal. Eighty HIV vaccines 鈥� 50 preventive and 30 therapeutic, according to the US National Institutes of Health 鈥� have failed in human trials following success in primates.
The monoclonal antibody TGN1412 failed spectacularly this year in humans, causing major organ failure in six people at Northwick Park Hospital in London, despite “proof of safety” in monkeys. Tests carried out in human tissue could have averted this fiasco.
Scientific justification for such a controversial practice must be demonstrated, instead of being merely asserted without substantiation.
A woman's right?
I read with interest John Harris’s piece on giving unlimited choice to women in relation to reproductive health (17 June, p 24). While I agree with much of his analysis, his article ignores the rights of society to impose restrictions on those choices. In some areas of India, for example, reproductive choices are leading to an imbalance of boys because female fetuses are being terminated.
I wonder where he would draw the line when medical choice becomes social choice. Perhaps Harris needs to consider not only the rights of women but also the impact of such unfettered choice. Do we need to draw lines when medical choices become social choices?
How big is your city?
To what extent is the measurement of the size of large cities affected by cultural bias or accidents of history that defined administrative boundaries (17 June, p 36)? I read that London is not a megacity as it only has 7.5 million people, but does that figure include everyone living in the sprawl inside the M25 orbital motorway, or only those within the official limits of Greater London? There are a lot of people in the outer suburbs who all add to the massive size of this city, even if the fact that they live in Watford, Staines, Dartford or many other suburbs does not make them “Londoners”.
This is even more marked in Paris, with its boundary tightly drawn within the P茅riph茅rique motorway. Perhaps the opposite happens in Japan. Are the Japanese proud of Tokyo’s status as the largest city in the world and do they include as many suburbs as possible to boost their figure?
The editor writes:
鈥� The question of size is a thorny issue which does indeed depend on the way boundaries are drawn.
From Rolf Schmidt
I greatly enjoyed reading about Ecopolis, the city of the future that can save the planet from environmental destruction. Unfortunately, though, we must see the Dongtan eco-development in the perspective of the massive scale of China’s economy. In this perspective it is about as significant as fitting an energy-saving bulb to the tail light of a bicycle whose owner normally uses a car. But it is a start, and the lessons learned from an eco-settlement on this scale will undoubtedly be very useful.
Charleston, Ross and Cromarty, UK
Carbon proposals
Our tropical rainforests basically use sunlight and water to convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into carbon-containing solids, such as trees, which can then be used as construction materials or as biomass fuel to generate energy.
Would it be possible to build large “carbon islands” on which suitable species could be grown hydroponically to provide such fuel and materials? These islands could be towed to suitable offshore locations in tropical seas where they could be anchored in large groups, many kilometres in area. Their harvested materials could then be exported to purchasing countries.
Could such carbon islands be large enough to influence local sea and air temperatures, and perhaps even modify the formation of hurricanes?
Although some innovative design work would be required, this could perhaps be essentially a low-tech concept, commencing quickly and expanding over the next 50 years or so. Could such projects help to reduce our inevitable global warming problems?
From John Bush
To reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, each nation should replace all existing taxes with one simple tax calculated to bring in the required revenue. It would be charged at so much per unit of carbon in all fossil fuels, whether extracted from a country’s own resources or imported, and payable by the extractors and importers, who would then add it onto their sale price. Individual citizens would no longer need to calculate or pay tax at all.
Fossil fuels would become many times more expensive than at present. Citizens could then reduce their expenditure by simply using less fossil fuel. Renewable energy would become cheaper than traditional sources. Workers would live near their work again, and our addiction to air and road travel would be reduced. Smaller cars would be driven, houses would be insulated and we would wear warm clothes again. Locally grown food would be eaten in preference to that brought from around the world.
This new tax would be much cheaper and easier to administer. The enormous army of accountants and other office workers currently engaged in enforcing, calculating or avoiding the complicated tax laws would be freed from this work, and could be usefully employed in the renewable energy field.
Mount Barker, Western Australia