Silent night
It’s not my partner’s insomnia that bothers me, it’s my own. As regular as clockwork he wakes in the middle of the night and reaches for New 杏吧原创. In truth, I applaud such behaviour, but the crinkling of the pages being turned is loud enough to wake the dead. Can you please, please do something to reduce that crackle. I remember the kids used to have cloth books they could take into the bath. Maybe you could experiment along those lines?
For the record
鈥he DOI reference for the article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences mentioned in our short report on increasing storm frequency in the US (8 December, p 18) should have been .
鈥� The bishop who calculated the date of the Creation spelled his name Ussher (24 November, p 57).
Second-hand smoking gun
You accuse scientists of “mangling the facts” about the immediate effects of second-hand smoke on the cardiovascular system (10 November, p 8). You quote Mike Siegel of Boston University saying: “It is certainly not correct to claim that a single 30-minute exposure to second-hand smoke causes hardening of the arteries, heart attacks or strokes.” You go on to imply that I agreed with the position that “there is no proof 30 minutes of passive smoking raises the risk of a heart attack for a non-smoker.” Both these statements oversimplify what we know about second-hand smoke’s cardiovascular effects, including potentially serious short-term effects.
There is strong and convincing evidence, from a wide variety of studies, that even brief exposure to second-hand smoke leads to blood and blood vessels behaving similarly to what is observed in chronic smokers. While 30 minutes of SHS exposure does not precipitate a heart attack in every non-smoker, it does, among other things, activate platelets and depress function of the vascular endothelium (the lining of arteries) in a way that is known to trigger heart attacks in people at risk. These are precisely the immediate effects that anti-platelet drugs like aspirin are designed to prevent.
While it would be unethical to do the obvious experiment 鈥� expose people at risk to 30 minutes of second-hand smoke to test whether it triggers a heart attack 鈥� there is direct evidence that eliminating second-hand smoke has an immediate and substantial effect on the risk of a heart attack. Seven independent studies 鈥� in Helena, Montana; Pueblo, Colorado; Bowling Green, Ohio; New York state; Piedmont, Italy; Ireland, and Scotland) have consistently shown about a 25 per cent drop in hospital admissions for heart attacks after smoke-free laws went into effect. This is exactly what one would expect based on the rapid biological effects.
The continuing attacks on the science and organisations that are working to help the public understand the important, substantial and immediate effects of second-hand smoke on the heart are following well-worn approaches that the tobacco industry pioneered: put words in other people’s mouths, set up straw men and knock them down. And, do it over and over and over again, hoping that the media will repeat them.
The public statements from public-health and medical authorities and individual scientists who are actually conducting research in this area have been measured, carefully presented, and based on the evidence.
From Jonathan Bagley
The letter from ASH (UK) (1 December, p 24) is laughable. In an ASH briefing you can read: “A small study in 2001 concluded that even half an hour of exposure to SHS can reduce coronary blood flow”.
This would be interpreted by most people as “can cause a heart attack”.
Further down we have: “During the six months the (smoking ban) law was enforced the number of heart attack admissions fell from 40 admissions during the year prior to the law to 24 after the law was enacted. The ordinance was subsequently overturned and the number of heart attack admissions returned to previous levels, around 40 per year.”
This suggests that passive smoking can cause almost instant heart attacks. Furthermore, the Scottish study it quotes has been thoroughly challenged, for example .
Todmorden, Lancashire, UK
Proof of deity
I enjoyed the article headlined “God’s place in a rational world” (10 November, p 6) but have always felt that scientific debate about the existence of God is futile. After all, how do you disprove something that exists beyond our universe?
Your article did, however, make me think that perhaps there is an experiment that could be conducted to disprove the existence of God. My experiment is based on the hypothesis that it will be impossible to create an artificial intelligence that can satisfy the Turing test and does not believe in God.
Shrimp shrank?
As a aficionado of unusual units of measurement I was sad to see Feedback’s demolition of Vietnam’s 1983 shrimp production as a standard unit of measure (27 October). So sad, in fact, that I spent more time searching the web looking through journals with titles like Shrimp Today and Shrimp Industry News than I can strictly afford. So imagine my delight when on I found: as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of tonnes Feedback claimed.
Perhaps 40 years of war, B-52 strikes, use of pesticides, Agent Orange and so on somewhat depressed shrimp production at the time.
Feedback writes:
That estimate was for the Red River estuary only. The true value of the unit may never be known.
Mind machine
There is more to flicker than you mention in your article on “flicker illness” (10 November, p 77). For people who do not have seizures when confronted with flicker, it is possible to close the eyes and let a bright light flicker on the eyelids which will provoke very vivid visions. The artist and writer Brion Gysin developed a sculpture to do this 鈥� a sculpture to be looked at with the eyes closed (see ). Gysin said the flicker worked on the alpha waves in the brain. Unfortunately, museum curators didn’t seem to have alpha waves, so he was not very successful in selling his “Dreamachines” to museums.
Drugs work sometimes
I entirely agree with Morgan Haldane, Sophia Frangou and Spilios Argyropoulos (24 November, p 24) that medication is helpful in schizophrenia 鈥� although whether the newer atypical drugs, with their own distinctive repertoire of side effects such as diabetes, represent an advance is questionable.
Antipsychotic medication was discovered because astute individual clinicians noted the potential effect of drugs developed for other uses. It had nothing to do with attempts to “unpick the biological basis of schizophrenia”.
And how have studies of the “environmental stressors” and “neurotransmitter genotypes” improved the lot of even one individual with schizophrenia? I do not wish to overplay the role of cognitive therapy in acute treatment and relapse, but evidence of its effectiveness is accumulating.
How dare Morgan Haldane and colleagues be so glib about chlorpromazine? I nearly died in the outback of the English Lake District on a glorious summer’s day, because doctors had not told me that this disgusting concoction is photosensitising. They then suggested I use a barrier cream and stop going out in daylight.
Then there are the thousands of patients crippled by tardive dyskinesia.
Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, UK
Nota bene
I may well have been one of those to surprise Dennis Woodman (3 November, p 26) by transcribing a document instead of photographing or scanning it, or having it copied. I sometimes sketch things in preference to photographing them: it forces me to read or look at them properly there and then, rather than at some future time.
A copy is a useful back-up in case of doubts about the accuracy of the original notes, and a photograph may include details whose significance emerges only when putting together disparate pieces of evidence. That does not diminish the value of initial close concentration, which is, in my view, well worth the time expended.
It's in the mix
Scaling odours from pleasant to unpleasant and linking liking to molecular structure is one thing (17 November, p 48). Applying this to perfumery is a classic example of over-extrapolation of data.
If perfume consisted of one odour compound, the correlation might hold. In practice, perfumes contain several hundred components, which creates one level of perceptual complexity, and then there are interactions between the odours at the receptor level and at the cognitive level that add yet more complexity.
I agree with Charles Sell, quoted in the article, that we are still a long way off understanding perfumes. The article does, however, highlight progress towards understanding the odour-structure relationships of single odorants.
China in a bull shop
Your cover story on the rise of China as an economic and technological power (10 November, p 48) included a sombre article (“It’s raining men”, p 63) dealing with the potentially destabilising effect of China’s evolving glut of males. If China dropped its hostility to homosexuality and allowed gay marriage, millions of gay men could openly arrange their affairs in a way that would relieve some of the country’s sexual pressure.
And what about some changes to the norms of heterosexual relations that would even give the west pause, such as polyandry? The Chinese may have to get very creative along these lines, or face either an explosion of male violence or a mass exodus of virile men to greener pastures.
Not even probable
Andrew Baker says, following David Hume, that we cannot be sure the sun will come up tomorrow based on the understanding that it has always come up before (24 November, p 22). From this he argues that science cannot establish the existence of the causal links required to apply the precautionary principle and take action against threats such as global warming.
The global warming deniers are not troubled by such philosophical niceties when they make their disastrous decisions, which affect all of the planet.
Their arguments are based on the certainties of the fossil fuel market and the absolute truths of the stock exchange.
They can rely on their deep insight that superior power beats superior knowledge every time.
Unlike Baker, I feel quite capable of coping with the awful knowledge that in our misguided zeal to expose the near certainty of global catastrophe, we may well be inflicting irreparable damage on somebody’s belief in what they heard in introductory philosophy.
Baker’s conclusion that science should offer probabilistic predictions to policy-makers may be both sensible and important. But it is not rationally justifiable by his own arguments. If we invoke Hume’s doubts about induction to undermine causal explanations, then we must accept that they apply equally to probabilities.
The measurements that supported a given probability in the past may not do so in the future. The fact that things predicted with a high probability have, in the past, proved more likely to happen than those with a low probability does not mean that they will continue to do so.
To appeal to Karl Popper’s thesis that scientists should not pursue truth but should seek to falsify their hypotheses does not help. That thesis rests on the inductive assumption that, once refuted, a hypothesis will prove false in future.
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, UK
鈥ume realised that his demonstration of the impossibility of establishing causation had huge implications, especially since it meant that even using probabilities was problematic. But probability, Hume said, was the best way out that we knew of. Somehow we must reconcile his arguments to achieve practical outcomes like management.
Every cell is sacred?
You suggest that the ability to turn skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells “avoids the moral objections that go with” harvesting embryonic material (24 November, p 3). In fact, if we retain an arbitrary definition of life and death, this new technology poses new quandaries.
If a life could be created from any old piece of human tissue, then the classic division of opinion arises. Some people might become morally distraught at the disposal of dandruff, while others could be reassured that aborting a pregnancy in the first trimester is not so much a killing as an amputation.
If there is no difference in the “aliveness” of an embryo and a skin cell, then no moral dilemmas are resolved until we develop a more sophisticated understanding of what a life really is.
Trade whose emissions?
In your editorial on climate change (1 December, p 5) you say: “make each country responsible for all its carbon emissions”.
If a Japanese company owns a factory in China which is making goods to sell to customers in the US, then whose emissions are they?
Reason or religion
I am surprised anyone would be so naive as to believe that science will eventually conquer all nature’s mysteries, as you report Peter Atkins does (10 November, p 6). Historians and philosophers of science have already shown through analyses of scientific revolutions and of chaotic systems that this cannot happen.
Consideration of evolutionary biology gives us a similar lesson: science is done with human brains, using human cognition, and so is necessarily constrained by what our brains can and cannot represent about the universe. But all that aside, any scientist knows that the moment all mysteries are conquered is the moment their grant money dries up.
From John Falla, London, UK
It may be true, as your editorial states, that replacing religion with science is fanciful (10 November, p 3). But what’s not fanciful is separating the state and religion. Prying the dying hands of the Anglican church from the British state is a move that is long overdue. What is also not fanciful is separating education and religion. I am appalled by the continued state funding of faith schools in the UK.
From Peter Scott, North Walsham, Norfolk, UK
Why is belief so dangerous? Well, if people allow themselves to be persuaded to accept one absurd idea, it becomes much easier to make them accept others, such as statements that Muslims, blacks or Jews are inferior or damned, for example. From there, it is a small step to condoning and justifying the destruction of those groups.
As Mark Twain said, “Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.”
From John Osborn, Martinez, California, US
What good is religion? I’ll tell you. It is by far the greatest labour-saving device ever invented.
Because once you believe, you never have to think again. The amount of painful effort this must have saved throughout history is enormous!
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