Blood beef
Andy Coghlan asks: “After decades of clinical failures and ethical controversy, could 2008 mark a new dawn for artificial blood?” (5 January, p 11).
Unfortunately, I can’t see how it will mark an end to ethical controversy, since the article goes on to say that the new substitute uses “haemoglobin extracted from cow blood”.
This is obviously a big ethical problem for most vegetarians and many Hindus.
Arbitrary puzzle
Your article on brain training included the puzzle below (12 January, p 26). You give the answer as 53, apparently by numbering the rows and columns starting at the bottom right corner, and appending the row number to the column number.
Another solution would be: the first digit in one column plus the first digit in the next-but-one column always add up to 10.
This would mean the first digit in each column is, from left to right: 9, 6, 1, 4, 9, 6, 1.
To find the second digit look at the row instead 鈥� the second digit in one row and the second digit in the next-but-one row add up to 6.
Therefore the second digit in each row, from top to bottom, is 1, 2, 5, 4, 1, 2, 5. This gives the answer 11.
A simpler solution is to assume that the numbers in any given column are the same.
Subtracting 45 from 64 gives us 19, so go from right to left adding 19 to get the next-but-one column. The rows, right to left, are then 12, 26, 31, 45, 50, 64, 69. The answer is now 50.
A large 鈥� if not infinite 鈥� number of rules can be devised to generate any set of numbers placed arbitrarily on any grid or n-dimensional array.
There is no a priori reason to choose any of these rules, so problems of this type test only “can you spot the arbitrary choice made by the person devising the problem?”
For the record
鈥� The bee in the illustration to the article “Where have all the honeybees gone?” (22/29 December 2007, p 22) was not a honeybee, but a female solitary mining bee of the genus Colletes.
鈥� We misnamed Kanav Kahol of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, who researched surgeons’ performance after playing games (19 January, p 24). Sorry.
鈥� Burton on Trent is in Staffordshire, UK (15 December 2007, p 21).
Diet and delusion
“It is time to put science back in charge” states the one-man bandwagon Gary Taubes (19 January, p 17). Despite the fact that “we are overeating” it seems that dieting does not work.
But blaming the theory is not helpful. If a patient is prescribed penicillin for an infection and neglects to take it, it is not the drug that has failed but the patient; the same goes for a dietary recommendation.
杏吧原创s do not search for the “remembering gene” as causality for forgetting to take a pill. One problem is not that dieting does not work for people, but that people do not work for their diets.
Finding excuses for obesity, whether genetic or hormonal, enables people to disown responsibility for their actions, while a dietary education promotes self-ownership and encourages a healthier lifestyle. The plain truth is that burning off more calories than are consumed 鈥� admittedly easier said than done 鈥� will cause weight loss and a subsequent change in hormonal equilibrium.
Although overeating may not be the “root cause” of the problem, if Taubes would get his head out of the clouds and into the literature since 1945, he might realise that there is much current integrative research into energy balance, metabolism and the neuroendocrine basis of obesity. To declare otherwise does the scientists an injustice and the public a disservice.
I was interested to read Gary Taubes’s precis of his timely new book debunking the connection between overeating and obesity, but felt there were a number of flaws to the arguments contained in it. The most obvious, to my mind, stems from the assertion that children “overeat” during growth spurts. This is not true: they are merely eating in a manner to satisfy the demands of their bodies at that stage of their development.
How do you define “overeating” anyway? In adults 鈥� whose differing characteristics and lifestyles preclude the possibility of attaching a single calorific value to the concept 鈥� the only definition available is surely one along the lines of: “eating more food than you need, with the result that at least some of the excess is stored in the body”. Following such a diet for a long time will lead to obesity. The concepts of obesity and overeating are therefore mutually definitive, and any attempt to suggest they are not connected is therefore doomed.
Dites-vous 芦Yo!禄?
Your article about the lack of suitable non-gendered third person pronouns and the neologisms various sub-cultures employ as substitutes (5 January, p 7) ignored the simplest solution of all. I have noticed a growing prevalence, at least in written essays, of substituting the plural form of the pronoun for the singular. In much the same manner as thou and thine have long since been replaced by you and yours, he/she becomes “they”, his/her becomes “their”.
In closer circles of course, he and she preserve the same function as the French tu: my friend may be “he” or “she”, but my colleague is “they”. In papers where the use of first and second person pronouns are already discouraged, the third person neutral plural becomes an easily assimilated non-gender alternative.
Language death
David Peat’s article on language and physics (5 January, p 42) was most timely, given that languages are going extinct at roughly one per fortnight. About 5000 distinct languages remain, but comprise only a few dozen unrelated groups.
Languages such as Algonquin, Gilyak (spoken in Outer Manchuria) or Nama (spoken in Namibia) contain treasures of knowledge from botany to medicine, from psychology to cooking, every bit as entrancing as Algonquin insights into Einsteinian mechanics. Most of this will be irretrievably lost unless some effort is made to support continued native use of endangered languages.
Hydrogen risks
It is interesting that you report on the risk of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles colliding in tunnels (10 November 2007, p 29).
Six years ago I discussed the infrastructural changes that will be necessary to support a hydrogen vehicle economy, at the meeting at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2001.
Besides road tunnels, we also included public parking garages and home garages, noting their similar need for proper ventilation systems in the rare event of a tank leak and a spark occurring at the same time.
Evidence of bias
A gender bias in publication of refereed articles (19 January, p 7)? Does that really happen?
Well, there was that time when a journal that did not use double-blind refereeing sent back the reviewers’ comments and judgement to reject, not to little old first and corresponding author me, but to the second, male, author. Another journal, using a double-blind review process subsequently accepted and printed the article.
Filthy healthy
So we’re too clean? Let’s have an injection (12 January, p 34)! Is that the logical answer? Or could the products we use to keep ourselves so clean be implicated in causing the cancers that follow?
We must learn to think rationally. If we keep adding to our complex world, rather than simplifying it, a global eco-crisis is unavoidable.
Animal reality TV
Instead of waiting on artificial intelligence to analyse data gathered by animal reality-TV cameras (19 January, p 22) why not use human intelligence, which is already available 鈥� and much of which is wasted in watching human reality-TV shows? If you put the raw footage online with some instructions, you might be surprised how many people would enjoy helping to analyse it.
They won’t all be top-class biologists, but with some wiki-like tools and a forum I can imagine watching Animal Reality becoming pretty popular. You might even trigger some fun competition to find interesting bits of behaviour.
Beyond reason
Lawrence Krauss, commenting on the US presidential hopefuls, says “reason has to be the key basis of political decision-making” (5 January, p 45). While I acknowledge that every branch of science intrinsically requires reason as its primary platform, reason alone is not a satisfactory basis for management of a laboratory, let alone the government of a country. We have all known managers and politicians who base their hard decisions on “reason” driven by economic rationalism.
We expect those who manage our affairs to act with wisdom 鈥� which encompasses not only reason, but also adherence to moral/ethical standards.
Beyond biofuel
Jeremy Tomkinson says that biofuels “are the only available near to medium-term options for reducing vehicle exhaust emissions” (19 January, p 18). Not so. Reductions in national speed limits, firmly enforced, would have an immediate and permanent effect.
Nuclear waste
The UK government has finally given its backing to a new nuclear energy programme (19 January, p 6), presumably in response to ongoing concerns over climate change and security of supply. Setting aside the debates about economics, uranium availability or the somewhat controversial matter of whether nuclear power stations are really carbon-neutral, there is the issue of whether embracing the technology can be considered as sustainable development.
As it seems almost certain that a radioactive legacy would inhibit the ambitions of generations to come, the adoption of a new nuclear programme clearly contradicts the criteria for sustainable development: “development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”, as the Brundtland report of the World Commission on Environment and Development put it in 1987.
If the government wishes to uphold its commitments both to combating climate change and to pursuing sustainable development, nuclear is not an option.
From David Getling
You state that cheap uranium will last no more than a few decades. It would last a great deal longer if only fast breeder reactors were built. When one also considers dwindling coal reserves (19 January, p 38) it seems sheer folly to consider any other reactor design.
Politicians, and the general public, need to grow up and realise what a precious resource we have in uranium, and the power we can harness from it.
Christchurch, New Zealand
Physics wants respect
I was absolutely disgusted to read about the cuts in funding for physics projects in the UK and the US (19 January, p 5 and p 8). An 拢80 million cut for British physics is, frankly, ridiculous, and it only adds insult to injury that it comes after increases in funding had been proposed.
I will start a degree in physics this September, with hopes to make my name as a particle physicist, and am greatly concerned that physics, like science in general, is not being given the respect that such a fundamental subject deserves. I am disappointed by the general lack of regard for science shown by those with the authority to make a real difference, and by the media, who are happy to suggest that human-animal hybrids could create a species of sub-human slaves while failing to mention the diseases that could be cured by this alternative to fetal stem cell research.
I have found a petition against the UK funding cuts at . If it doesn’t succeed, I shall have to be comforted by the hope that in a parallel universe the funding was increased.
Diet and delusion
Gary Taubes is right to question whether we get fat because we overeat, or overeat because there is some regulatory or hormonal phenomenon that drives us to fatten (19 January, p 17). Whether he is right to pin all the blame on stimulation of insulin secretion by refined carbohydrates is another matter. There are other possibilities, such as inter-generation influences.
Average height has increased over a number of generations. This is not simply because nutrition has improved in every generation: the increasing size of the mother’s womb and the nutrition she can provide for the fetus must affect its potential.
Similarly, there is increasing evidence that obesity in the mother influences the susceptibility of her offspring to obesity, independently of their shared genetics. We must address obesity in mothers-to-be to give children the best chance in life.
I am confused. Gary Taubes claims obesity is not caused by eating too much, but by a “hormonal phenomenon” that makes us eat too much. Apparently this hormonal phenomenon is caused by eating too much sugar, and has nothing to do with eating too much.
Moe, Victoria, Australia
From Alastair Gentleman
Taubes is promiscuous with the term “overeat”. Had he referred simply to food intake above that required for normal body functioning, he might have been clearer. He hit the nail on the head pointing to the inescapability of the first law of thermodynamics: energy is conserved.
Over the Christmas period, I ate more food than I needed 鈥� I overate 鈥� and my weight increased. I blame no one but myself for this. I hypothesise that had I continued to eat at that rate, my weight would have continued to increase, resulting in me becoming clinically obese.
The link between cause and effect seems fairly clear.
Linlithgow, West Lothian, UK
Crops aren't invasive
It was good to see your comment that we need to consider the genes that are being deployed rather than the technique used to introduce them into crops (5 January, p 3 and p 28). However, we were puzzled by the claims that crops with increased drought or salt tolerance “might create highly invasive plants”.
Crops are highly dependent on humans for their survival, so it is very unlikely they will become invasive because of the introduction of just one tolerance trait. Modern cereals, the main crops that feed the world, have at least two traits that reduce their ability to be ecologically competitive: they do not shed their seeds upon maturity, which makes crops easier to harvest but reduces their ability to disperse; and the seeds have lost most dormancy traits, which makes them easier to grow but reduces their ability to survive for long periods in soil.
This means that crops are unlikely to become weeds just by increasing their drought and salt tolerance, whether this is done by genetic modification or by conventional means. Increasing drought and salt tolerance has the potential to increase yields enormously, with minimal risk to the environment.