Pee for problem
You explain the benefits of recycling urine, but do not mention whether synthetic oestrogens and other pharmaceuticals were filtered from the urine before it was thoughtfully sprinkled onto organic vegetable gardens in Sweden (23 December 2006, p 45). At the moment urine cannot be made clean enough to flush into a river or ocean until we deal with these synthetic oestrogens and other unknown harmful pharmaceuticals.
Are the Swedes aware of the impact these chemicals have had on male alligators in the Florida swamps, where reptiles born male develop female sexual organs? Men having to sit on a toilet to pee is the least of our worries.
The editor writes:
鈥� The researchers are well aware of these problems and are examining how to remove hormones and pharmaceuticals from separated urine. It is not clear whether spraying untreated urine directly onto fields causes problems in this respect but as it is only practised on a very small scale, the impact is likely to be minimal.
Earth saves the planet?
So soil sequesters significant amounts of carbon (2 December 2006, p 13). Perhaps those developing carbon sequestration as a technology should look at the Amazonian terra preta 鈥� the dark soils created by jungle agriculture.
We could farm trees, turn them into charcoal, grind it into dust, and give it to the farmers to plough into their fields. It would sequester CO2 and enrich farmlands at the same time.
Does hunting help?
There are a variety of mechanisms already in operation in many countries to ensure a significant proportion of the income from trophy hunting is used to benefit conservation (6 January, p 6). These may operate directly, through the funds going to the appropriate state agency or NGOs working in conservation; or they may be indirect, with funds going to local communities and thus providing an incentive for them to support conservation.
To say “when hunting revenue does trickle down to conservation projects” creates an overly negative impression. There are of course cases where little of the income goes to support conservation, but there are also many cases where almost all the funds generated are used for conservation purposes.
From Ingrid Newkirk, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Europe
Many of us in animal protection have come to regard the word “conservation” with scepticism, as it is often used to describe politically correct-sounding ways to sustain populations of hunters’ favoured species. Despite all the articles you have printed showing animals’ often staggeringly impressive abilities and social repertoire 鈥� including their desire to form relationships with others of their own kind and to love and protect them 鈥� how can you now fail to recognise that seeing one’s mother, friend or lover blown to smithereens might not be “beneficial”?
Species come and go, with our intervention or without, but like the bearskin hats worn by Buckingham Palace guardsmen, hunting for pleasure has no place in the 21st century.
London, UK
From Dominic Wormell
I agree with Sanjay Gubbi that conservation should be treated like education or public health, bringing long-term benefits to all (16 December 2006, p 20). Solutions should be pragmatic but also socially and culturally acceptable and based on long-term impacts.
Certainly there is money to be made from hunting. People have to make a living from the land, and allowing them to make money from the wildlife around them provides some incentive to sustain it. This does not, however, mean that trophy hunting for rich westerners is the right way to go.
In the long term I believe it will do more harm than good. Basing conservation practice and strategy on an ethically flawed pastime of the rich is wrong on many levels. It is elitist, smacking of a colonial past. It sends a mixed message to those who support conservation projects from afar. And it is hard to see how it can ever be said to be a part of the culture of an area.
Teaching children that biodiversity should be maintained so that the rich can shoot animals is not what is needed. The aim should be to educate young people to respect the land and its wildlife and be stewards of it for future generations.
Jersey, Channel Islands
Make the most of waste
Thanks for taking on the hugely important and complex topic of how we tackle consumer waste (6 January, p 31). Ed Douglas picked out some key points, but if products are to be positive for the environment, rather than just a little less bad, then there are only two ways to go: designing products so that they are readily recyclable or making them biodegradable. The concept is known as cradle-to-cradle production and does not necessarily require consumers to change their behaviour.
The next wave of materials coming out of the chemical industry are bioplastics from corn and other crops that can be used to make biodegradable products. Oil is getting more expensive and the chemical industry is looking to keep its costs low. Economics, not designers with undefined ideas of designing “emotionally satisfying” products, will drive these changes.
Biodegradable products can be considered as nutrients that can be thrown away. They could even be beneficial for our wider environment.
From John Thorn
Ed Douglas says that it is price competition between retailers that makes it cheaper to replace rather than repair. It seems to me that the root of the problem is that almost any consumer item bought in the developed world is built at third-world wage rates but has to be repaired at first-world rates, which are at least 10 times greater. In other words, this is a downside of globalisation 鈥� though not one that necessarily outweighs globalisation’s benefits.
Cardiff, UK
Evolution and invention
The writers of the letter from the Biologic Institute on intelligent design imply that natural selection should be discredited because human engineering is a fundamentally distinct mode of invention (13 January, p 18). They say that evolution provides solutions to problems through mindless accident. They should consider that even human inventiveness is largely only a process of selecting successful ideas and designs over unsuccessful ones, in a manner that is not truly distinct from natural selection.
Inventiveness involves newly generated ideas being tested against a backdrop of previous experiences and/or physics, geometry, chemistry and so on. Minds generate random variants specific to solving a problem, then select after careful consideration of the sum total of experience and intuition, making redundant those variants judged less likely to succeed. Is this not simply an accelerated form of natural selection, in which the mechanism of selection takes place in a mentally simulated environment?
The Biologic Institute is, therefore, wrong to assume that Darwinism insists that these are two fundamentally different modes of invention. It simply asserts that neither case involves intervention from a supernatural or extraterrestrial being.
From Geoff Holister
The Biologic Institute insists that “good science will come”. I could very well make the same promise about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I am logical enough to know that such a proclamation means nothing. When and if their “good science” is complete, I for one will be happy to read it. Until such time however, it remains nothing more than an unproven hypothesis and they really shouldn’t be surprised or offended when it is treated as such.
Marxist-Lennonist measures
I was saddened to read of the yocto and its associates xonto, yotta, xona, pekro and sorta (13 January, p 52). I had cherished the notion of these prefixes for minuscule measurements being called the Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo, as proposed by Morgan Burke, to general approval, on Usenet discussion forums back in 1993. The world would have been a richer place.
Light is vanity
Shuki Nakamura repeats the canard that “only 10 per cent of the input power [of a lighting system] is converted into light, and the rest is lost as heat” (6 January, p 44). In colder climes this heat is very often useful, warming our houses for us and saving money on central heating.
His statement that LED lighting “can convert 50 per cent of input energy into light” seems optimistic. The standard measure of luminous efficacy is lumens per watt, and the theoretical maximum is 683. Typical tungsten sources are rated at around 20 lumens per watt, which is indeed inefficient. The best commercially available LED light sources are rated at around 45 lumens per watt 鈥� twice as good but nowhere near the 103 for linear fluorescent sources, or more than 200 for low-pressure sodium lamps, which is why these are used as street lights.
For the record
鈥� Richard Bentall is professor of clinical psychology (at the University of Manchester, UK), not professor of psychological medicine as we stated on 20 January, p 46.
Concrete evidence
You claim that the discovery in Khufu’s pyramid of material containing amorphous silicon sandwiched between stone blocks “pushes back the first use of concrete by 2500 years” (9 December, p 6). Concrete is known to be much older than this. One of the earliest known examples is a hut floor dating from 5600 BC in what is now Serbia. It consisted of a mixture of red lime, sand and gravel.
Humankind has burned limestone to produce quicklime for many millennia, probably starting not long after the first use of fire. Quicklime mixed with clay soil, volcanic ash or burnt brick reacts slowly to produce cementitious compounds very similar to those found in hydrated Portland cement. This is known as a pozzolanic reaction, after Pozzuoli in Italy, the source of a pink sand that the Romans mixed with lime and water to make exceptionally strong concrete.
The combination of lime and pozzolanic material such as clay or volcanic ash was used in the construction of the pyramids of Shaaxi province in China. These pyramids are larger than those in Egypt and are believed to have been constructed about 5000 years ago, making them older too.
Medical reporting
In discussing the dance between the media and big pharma, and the distorted reporting of medical advances that can result, Peter Aldhous looks for remedies in self-regulation and consumer pressure (6 January, p 17). He shies away from suggesting more formal regulation of this emerging public health nightmare 鈥� perhaps because of the prevailing wisdom that the global economic freight train does its thing best in the absence of non-market-based interventions.
Yet in one activity that is central to market economies this prevailing wisdom is not applied. The raising of capital through publicly traded shares is almost always a highly regulated affair, and the dissemination of information through prospectuses and other invitations is controlled by stock exchange rules and laws administered by government watchdogs. This is done to protect investors and to promote commercial stability.
Surely the reliability of public health information is at least as important as the protection of investors in equity markets, and should be regulated accordingly.
No evidence for bias
You report a study that found research funded by the soft drinks industry has different results from research funded by other sources, and go on to suggest that there may be bias in the research itself (13 January, p 4). This inference is unjustified, for two reasons.
First, there is the choice of which research to fund. The authors of the study raise, but do not test, the hypothesis that research likely to be helpful to industry is more likely to attract its funding. They therefore have no grounds to reject this hypothesis in favour of the suggestion that it is the source of funding that determines the outcome of the research. Maintaining a diversity of sources of funding for scientific research will ensure that a wider range of research projects can attract funding.
Secondly, there is the conduct of the research itself. The whole point of the scientific method is to ensure that research results are not influenced by the sources of funding. Public scrutiny, including the processes of publication and peer review, prevent this from occurring. The authors of the study put forward no evidence that such influence has occurred, so there are no grounds for suggesting bias.
The soft drinks industry is required by regulatory authorities to demonstrate the safety of its products and so has an extensive commitment to credible and authoritative science.
Bush fire burden
When countries assess their annual carbon dioxide emissions, they count up their cars and power stations, but bush fires are not included 鈥� presumably because they are deemed to be events beyond human control. In Australia, Victoria alone sees several hundred thousand hectares burn each year; in both 2004 and the present summer, the figure has been over 1 million hectares. How many power-station-years’ worth of CO2 emissions does this represent?
As I look out of the window, visibility is very poor because of the thick bush-fire smoke cloud that blankets about a tenth of Australia. Meanwhile, government TV advertising makes us feel guilty for the CO2 we emit when we leave an extra light on. This seems disproportionate. Couldn’t a fraction of the billions of dollars earmarked for nuclear power stations be used to reduce real gas emissions 鈥� by stopping forests from burning?
Let’s have serious planning to prevent forest fires rather than rely on the desperate efforts of volunteer firefighters. There would be obvious gains from reducing the toll on wildlife, livestock and property, but shouldn’t fire-prone countries that make the effort gain carbon credits too?
Plague of plagues
I read the item on the search for lethal DNA sequences with increasing puzzlement (6 January, p 12). What possible justification could there be for engaging in research with such horrendous potential?
Splice a DNA sequence lethal to humans into a common virulent virus or bacterium and you have the plague to end all plagues. Has researcher Greg Hampikian not considered where his research could lead? While I am sure he does not intend to develop a bioweapon, I am less confident about the US Department of Defense, which you report is funding the research.
The editor writes:
鈥� Hampikian has considered this. He says the US government needs to understand what these sequences are in order to develop drugs against them should they ever fall into terrorists’ hands.