Any old sperm
You report that IVF babies are “about 60 per cent more likely to have birth defects than children conceived naturally” and that “scientists are still struggling to explain why” (24 February, p 18).
Surely it is because the sperm used is just any old sperm, not the very best sperm that swims fastest and gets to the egg first. With natural conception, that’s what happens. Here is another example of the survival of the fittest 鈥� Darwinism in action.
The pace of progress
Ray Kurzweil is clearly not an energy systems scientist, a microbiology statistician, or an expert in quarantine (3 March, p 19). The “technological innovation” that he so highly praises is built on a pyramid scheme that utilises the present wide availability of cheap energy from fossil fuels. The human world is at a cusp in development, facing both a climate crisis and an energy crisis. It is therefore prudent to carefully consider the carbon balance in the deployment of any technology.
Further, it is prejudgement to label everyone who questions the desirability of rapid change as “fearful of this pace”. I have perfectly rational reasons for objecting to genetically modified cotton and rice, which include considerations of water stress, chemical burden, genetic degradation and imposition of foreign control. How does applying the principle of precaution in my rejection of the rapid deployment of the genetic modification of organisms make me “dangerous” or a “fundamentalist”?
Traditional techniques of agriculture, with a little tweaking, yet retaining organic and low-tech, low-cost principles, can boost crop yields in a way that the large agrochemical companies only dream of. We don’t actually need biotech.
Before we accept a technology we have to be sure it will not irrevocably destroy some part of our habitat or be harmful to life. We must be cautious about releasing technologies such as genetically modified organisms into the environment. We must relinquish emissions of petrochemicals and other exotic chemicals into the environment. More importantly, we must also relinquish the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Biofuel bonus
One proposed solution for the interrelated problems of energy supply, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and waste disposal is for power stations that burn fossil fuels to remove and sequester CO2 from their waste flue gases (17 February, p 9).
Never have I seen it proposed that if power stations were to be fuelled using materials directly or indirectly taken from recent plant growth, the sequestration of the waste CO2 would reduce the amount of the gas in the atmosphere because it would take what the plants had absorbed out of the natural carbon cycle. Fuels could include plant biomass grown for fuel, the residue from the production of liquid biofuels for internal combustion engines, the compostable waste that we now bin separately, and even treated sewage sludge.
In one hit we should get energy, removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and easy waste disposal. What have I missed?
Hot rocks
In all the fuss and confusion about energy and carbon problems one dull but crucial fact has been overlooked: the oil industry can now routinely drill to depths of 10 kilometres. This means the Earth’s core, the 7000-kilometre-diameter ball of molten iron, is now available as an energy source, as this heat seeps out to the upper layers. A recent study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that there is enough thermal energy at a depth of 10 kilometres in crystalline rocks (at temperatures of 200 to 300 掳C) under the US alone to supply the whole world at its current consumption rate for 30,000 years.
The editor writes:
鈥� We have reported an estimate that hot rock beneath the US could supply its energy needs for two millennia: see “Hot clean power under our feet” (27 January, p 4)
Oil is vanishing
Your article on the aviation industry’s efforts to reduce its harmful effects on the atmosphere was interesting, but one cannot help being struck by the futility of the exercise (24 February, p 32). Trawling various websites, it seems that about 1200 billion barrels of oil are estimated to be left in the ground. That is probably optimistic, as petroleum producers have an incentive to post high estimates 鈥� but let’s accept it anyway.
Consumption is growing rapidly, especially in China, India and South America. Current trends will lead to consumption of about 45 billion barrels a year by about 2012. At some point in the next few decades, the cost of extracting oil and its scarcity will lead to ever higher prices and so a huge fall-off in consumption.
Investments such as a new runway at London’s Heathrow airport, which is projected to come into service in 2017, or the new aircraft designs in your article, will not have enough economic life to service their capital investment.
From Martin Murray
Yet another feature telling us how better fuel efficiency can offset global warming misses the main issue. The only way to improve the outcome is to leave as much fuel as possible in the ground.
We are in the position of a bus-load of people heading for a cliff. Slowing the bus just gives us more time to scream. The only effective way forward is to have a target for how little of the remaining fossil fuel reserves to extract in total, and to work out how to achieve this. It will be a difficult problem to solve both technically and politically, but clever solutions to the wrong problem will only delay tackling the real one and provide a smokescreen that the oil industry will welcome.
Telford, Shropshire, UK
Useful idiots
Lawrence Krauss calls for physicists to oppose US policy on nuclear weapons (17 February, p 18). Let me suggest that, where matters of government policy are concerned, physicists are no more qualified than laymen 鈥� worse than laymen, in fact. The magician and sceptical inquirer James Randi has pointed out that fake psychics can more easily fool physicists and other practitioners of the hard sciences than other people, because the scientists are used to dealing with material that, however difficult, does not intentionally deceive them.
This is equally applicable to foreign policy. Reflect upon the brilliant western physicists who handed over the secrets of the atomic bomb to Stalin, who was at the time the world’s leading mass murderer. In identifying the US as the world’s greatest nuclear threat Krauss becomes a worthy successor to this sorry tradition.
Not so green
You quote the city fuel consumption of the Toyota Prius as 60 miles per US gallon (3 February, p 21). The current Prius does not get 60 mpg in city driving. Consumer Reports noted 44 mpg overall for the 2006 model, and the survey of owners on the car-buying advice website Edmu nds cited the same overall: see .
Plague pets
The Blood Plague in World of Warcraft did not originate from a “labyrinth of caves”, as Kim Coppola reports (24 February, p 39). It came from an outdoor “instance” (an area of the game that is separated from the rest of the world) 鈥� the ruined troll city of Zul’Gurub.
Coppola describes how the disease was spread by virtual pets in the game and says that these are pets that players can acquire in-game “in exchange for treasure they’ve found or in-game cash they’ve earned”. This is half right, in that you can buy small, non-combat pets; but this is irrelevant since these pets are purely aesthetic and could not possibly have contracted an attribute that drains life from a player’s character like the one involved in the Blood Plague. The pets that in fact did this were “combat pets”, which can be tamed from the wild by a particular kind of character in the game, the Hunter, to fight alongside them. Hunters’ pets can be resurrected freely, unlike the imaginary pets you are describing. One of your sources, Nina Fefferman, seems to be imagining the same thing when she says: “If your pet dies, that’s it. It costs time, and virtual money, to get it back.”
Dying is extremely irritating, but not because of costs incurred buying pets, but rather through the slow trip from the graveyard back to your corpse in ghost form after you die and the damage that is inflicted on your weapons and armour every time you get killed. This costs a substantial amount of gold to repair, so I can see how dying repeatedly in a city for days on end would be a serious cause for concern, especially for all the low-level characters just starting out in the game, who were particularly prone to dying from the Blood Plague.
From Brian Goodhart
Please allow this World of Warcraft player to make one minor correction. The Blood Plague originated with the god of blood, Hakkar, who resides in Zul’Gurub. For those of us who dislike caves in both the real and virtual worlds, Zul’Gurub is thankfully free of them. Hakkar reigns from an altar in the great outdoors.
Potomac Falls, Virginia, US
Ship of fools
You show a ship “towing” a house following the tsunami at Burin in Newfoundland, Canada (24 February, p 53). I served over 42 years in the British Royal Navy, but have yet to see an anchored ship towing anything, let alone a house.
From Sue Jones and Kevon Kenna
We found Richard Lovett’s article on the Grand Banks tsunami interesting but were puzzled by the picture. The caption says “The steamer Daisy tows a house back to the mainland of the Burin peninsula” but the picture shows a securely moored schooner, not a steam ship.
A little research on the web revealed that one Captain Whelan and the Daisy did indeed do sterling service after the disaster, rescuing houses and other items from the water. But the picture is of a different vessel and a house that the Daisy did not rescue. The schooner is the Marian Belle Wolfe, which stayed at her moorings, and the house attached to her 鈥� after being towed in from offshore and before being restored to dry land 鈥� was from Port au Bras. It was rescued by its owner, Steven Isaacs, and his father William Isaacs.
The story can be found at: .
In the course of solving this little puzzle, we have learned a great deal about the tsunami and the lives of the people of Burin and neighbouring villages at the time of the quake. Thank you for making the error and setting us hunting for the facts!
Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK and St Kilda, Victoria, Australia
Iron in the genes
Sharon Moalem links the clustering of carriers of the C282Y mutation and the associated iron overload syndrome to the Black Death (17 February, p 42). An alternative explanation occurs to me: the areas where more than 5 per cent of the population carry the mutation are the British Isles, northern Spain and Brittany, all areas once dominated by Celts, and parts of Scandinavia 鈥� Viking territory.
Could the mutation have occurred within one of these population groups, explaining the clustering seen?
This could be either complementary to the theory of Black Death survival, or independent of it.
The blind cartoonist
Malcolm Moore notes that the figures on your cover for 13 January “appear to lack reproductive organs” and that this either requires immaculate reproduction or results in a short evolutionary path (17 February, p 21). The truth is that here we are observing a colony creature known as the evolutionary sequence cartoon. This strange and mimetic creature has been developing (either by the normal vagaries of Darwinian evolution or more likely by intelligent, or at least semi-intelligent design) since at least the 1880s, with one period of explosive radiation around 1925 in Tennessee, followed by a second during modern times and centred on Kansas. For a history of the species see my essay “The Evolution of the Evolution Cartoon” at .
Terrestrial intelligence
Reg Dennick asks whether most of us who are donating unused CPU cycles to SETI@home wouldn’t prefer using them to something more worthy such as preventing disease (17 February, p 20). Personally, I’m happy to help with malaria research, which I’ve just added to the configuration of my BOINC setup, which allows me to take part in several such projects simultaneously 鈥� see 鈥� and with other projects that commercial interests won’t touch.
I’m less interested in helping with cancer, H5N1 or AIDS because it is likely that big pharma will commercialise the results. Donating unused cycles to a non-profit project is one thing; subsidising a drug company’s shareholders is quite another.
My signified other
Blimey! More fiendish rocket stuff from the scientists. Mel Slater has discovered that humans respond affectively to “virtual” (or, as we used to say, “fictional”) characters (24 February, p 41). Do you think this could account for the antiquity of our fascination with representational forms in art, narrative and drama and their semiotic content 鈥� for example, the ways that the signifiers they contain point to the signified?
The biosemiotic “recognition” of similarity in difference is probably a primal quality of all living organisms. The drive towards representational forms in which identity and difference are played out is doubtless an extension of this basic biological gesture. In us, it is probably also the basis of our social and ethical capacities. Art and narrative forms would neither exist nor persist if they did not have the great value of extending our experience and sympathies in life-enhancing ways.
The “brainocentric” model of consciousness espoused by Marvin Minsky (same issue, p 48) is equally ignorant of the dimension of biosemiosis in all living things. Obviously, consciousness must be both embodied and “enworlded”. We are intellectually hobbled by this ideologically driven idea of consciousness as simply individualistic. Consciousness is almost certainly an emergent feature of brain, body and environment, all of which are complex systems shaped by both nature and culture, and having both histories and limits. Like all emergent phenomena, consciousness depends upon an evolutionary ontology that embodies an ecological history and to which it has very limited access. Building all that biosemiosis into a machine is a vast task.
Apart from saying that I wish there was a bit more traffic 鈥� in both directions 鈥� across that old two-cultures divide, I guess that’s enough for one letter.
Insignificance
Bryn Glover’s point (17 February, p 20) about Andrew Oswald’s review of Affluenza by Oliver James (27 January, p 44) highlights one deficiency of the article: the use of a truncated vertical axis on the graph. This is a ploy used by banks to convince us to change accounts when one offers a tiny advantage in interest rates over another. It is exacerbated by Andrew Oswald’s reply justifying his results by citing the statistically significant difference between columns.
As I used to tell my students, there are two kinds of significance to address in social science research: the statistical, which tells you whether or not the difference seen is likely to have been the result of chance; and the practical, which is about whether the difference is big enough to be concerned about or worth doing something about.
Glover addressed the practical significance by challenging the exaggerated truncated graph. Oswald tried to rebut him with statistical significance. This is confounded by the fact that this is a retrospective study, not an experiment in which the researchers would have had control of variables, so we cannot even talk about causality, only the possibility of change for reasons so far unknown.
Taking the article, the letter and the rebuttal into account, the only thing one can conclude is that there has been a change that can be attributed to something other than chance, but that this change is very small and may not indicate anything practically significant, such as a need for social or economic change.
I agree that we probably are going to hell in a handbasket, but neither James nor Oswald seems to present sound evidence. Such poor use of quantitative data in social science research is what gives the field a bad name. This is not the first time truncated graphs and confusion about “significance” has appeared in New 杏吧原创.
For the record
鈥� We misspelled Xiao-Wei Chen’s name in our report on the production of carbon nanotubes in volcanic rock (17 February, p 23). Sorry.
鈥� The correct name of the lead researcher in the news item on cowbirds (10 March, p 14) is Jeffrey Hoover.
鈥� Feedback referred to a non-alcoholic “beer” for dogs as “Keispelbier”, which is meaningless (17 February). It should have been “Kwispelbier”.
Telltale taskbar
I was intrigued by the screen shot that accompanied your article on pastors swapping the pulpit for the webcam (17 February, p 24). It included taskbar icons at the foot of the screen, showing other programs that the user had open.
One was a web page whose title started with the words “Ousted Pastor’ Compl…”: with the help of a search engine I found that this could have been an article about the anti-homosexual preacher, Ted Haggard, who was found to be using a male prostitute.
Was this a deliberate slip?
The editor writes:
鈥� The screen shot was supplied to us by
Software plague
Nina Fefferman is looking into the “Blood Plague” outbreak in the World of Warcraft multiplayer online game as a model for real-world outbreaks (24 February, p 39). WoW does have, as you state, upwards of 7.5 million regular subscribers. The game world is heavily subdivided, though: most of the servers that players connect to have an upper limit of 7000 to 10,000 players, and the game realms or “shards” that these run are isolated from one another.
As a result, WoW could only provide a small sample, repeated many times 鈥� unlike Second Life or Eve Online, which are continuous virtual universes. Also, the Blood Plague was spread through “non-player characters” that are modelled by the game software, are stationary and could easily be avoided by players.
Row, row, row your boat
There is no doubt that boatmen were different in ancient Greece (10 February, p 46). The ancient Greeks rowed hours, days, weeks, months, years, doing nothing else during their waking hours but rowing. Our modern-day sportsmen and women would be hard pushed to stay shoulder-to-shoulder with these lads.
My father, Ben Parsonage, was the last of the river Clyde boatmen/watermen. Without using outboard motors, he could easily row as far as 30 kilometres downriver with a 20-stone (130-kilogram) man sitting at the back of the boat and, after a day of work on the river, row back. He could row upriver against currents I have never been able to overcome, to places I have never been able to reach and in times I have never been able to match. At the age of 75 he could still row faster than I could, even though at the young age of 63 I am still the fastest fixed-seat sculler in Scotland. He was 5 feet 1 inch (1.55 metres) tall and weighed only 65 kilograms.