Two legs good
Dan Jones discusses the origins of bipedalism, but makes no mention of the possibility that our ape ancestors may have developed in an area that was flooded, either part of the year or all the time 鈥� such as the edge of a mangrove swamp (8 March, p 36).
I have seen videos of apes crossing rivers on their hind legs, carrying their arms up high to help them balance, so it is obviously possible for apes to be bipedal when necessary. Apes in mangrove may have extended this action to forage in shrubs on the land.
Norfolk the nation
Feedback doubts that Norfolk Island is a nation state (29 March). But it is, you know. It has its own flag (a Norfolk Island pine), its own national anthem (God Save the Queen), a roaring duty-free export trade and tourist trade, no taxes and a population of about 1500. The island was given by Queen Victoria to the descendants of the Bounty mutineers around 1850. The red island soil looks more like Devon than Norfolk and the locals sound like Devon people too.
Technically, the island is an External Territory of Australia, but it has its own strict immigration laws so Australians can’t live permanently there either.
Closed for repairs
As an engineer, I could not help but put together key elements from two articles, namely “Thought Control” (1 March, p 44) and “Sleep Tight” (15 March, p 30). The former outlines the amazing work done in identifying the molecules responsible for controlling the formation of brain neuron connections and those responsible for tagging of synapses for removal. But it makes no mention of when this activity is likely to occur. If an engineer has to make serious modifications to the control system of a complex plant, either part or all of it is shut down to facilitate software and firmware changes and associated testing before the system is brought back on-line.
Is the activity of brain structure molecular regulators confined to the hours of sleep? If tests can be conducted to verify this then perhaps the Mystery of Sleep is solved.
Black hole quandary
I look intently at the pictorial representations of black holes that appear regularly in New 杏吧原创 and wonder: with all that light-bending going on, it seems strange that none of the bent light obscures the black hole’s event horizon and disc from external observers.
I would expect intuitively that one would see a smudge or a normal space-scape, not a black black hole. If this is the case, it raises a tricky question for illustrators: how can black holes be both accurately rendered and scary-looking?
Acronymism
You mention the Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment, a group funded by the tobacco industry that attacks health “puritanism” (16 February, p 11). Was this a case of acronymal nominative determinism?
For the record
鈥� An editing error had us stating that the monks at Canterbury cathedral who made one of the first sightings of transient lunar phenomena did so in the 10th century (28 March, p 41); in fact it was in 1178, which was, of course, in the 12th century.
Silent dawn
While traffic noise may reduce the morning chorus in some areas I suggest that the main cause is the decline in common birds (29 March, p 35). We moved into our quiet Suffolk village in 1975. The chorus then was sufficiently loud for one frequent visitor to keep her bedroom window shut and the curtains drawn to avoid being woken at dawn. This has not been a problem for at least 10 years.
As we are in an Area of Outstanding Beauty there have been no significant developments, and with the closure of a nearby US air force air base at the end of the cold war both traffic and other noise has if anything diminished. To my admittedly inexpert eye there have been no great changes in the surrounding agriculture.
However, while in the first years we had up to 14 house martin’s nests, for years we have had none. One of the autumn sights was them lining up on the power lines before migration 鈥� not any more. Sparrows, once frequent, are scarce. When food was thrown out for the birds it would only be a matter of minutes before a flock of starlings would descent. Now I cannot even remember when I last saw one, or heard a cuckoo or a nightingale for that matter. Thrushes, blackbirds and long-tailed tits are sadly diminished. Even the wood pigeon numbers have gone down, though admittedly these have been replaced by the collared variety. No birds 鈥� no song!
WIMP force
Jason Palmer reports that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) may in fact interact, annihilating one another and releasing gamma radiation (15 March, p 10). If so, this would presumably cause the universe’s mass to slowly decrease, so reducing the gravitational drag on its expansion.
What’s more, the masses of the postulated WIMPs are supposed to be much larger than a proton’s, so WIMPs being destroyed would release a strong pulse of radiation. Radiation can exert a pressure, so this would also tend to accelerate expansion. This seems to me to be a plausible picture of how disintegrating WIMPs could offer an alternative explanation to dark energy for the universe’s accelerating expansion. But then I am only a microbiologist, so what do I know of such things?
Here be humans
Stephen Kirby suggests monkeys may prefer silence to any music at all so that they can listen for danger (15 March, p 22). This poses the further question: why do humans like noise so much?
Children playing can sustain their shouting and screaming for long periods. Adults generate hours of noise in football crowds or musical events.
Perhaps early humans used noise within their settlements as a sonic equivalent of a bee’s stripes: a warning to predators of spears and arrows. When out on our own, however, staying silent and alert is the safer option.
Turn up the volume
I always enjoy Feedback taking the mickey at the expense of foggy thinking. But you refer to the difficulty of visualising nine-dimensional spaces occasioned by measurements in “cubic litres” (15 March). This implies the cubing of a cube 鈥� and, no matter how hard I try, the cube of 3 will not come out at 9.
Testing animal tests
Your editorial suggests that it may be time to thank animal technicians in published papers for the indispensable role they play (29 March, p 5). Perhaps it is also time to assess the usefulness of animal research, to see whether causing so much grief to technicians, as well as to the majority of the public, is worth it.
As Robert Matthews recently noted (16 February, p 20), there have been few systematic studies of the value of animal experiments, and there is no published evidence that animal studies are more informative than tossing a coin.
Europeans for Medical Progress would like to see a comparison between animal tests for drug safety with a panel of state-of-the-art techniques based on human biology. In the UK, 250 members of parliament and 83 per cent of general practitioners support this idea.
From Andrew Rowan,
Your story on the distress suffered by those who look after lab animals (29 March, p 8) confirms research in the late 1980s by ethnographer Arnold Arluke of Northeastern University.
He found high levels of guilt and sorrow among animal care staff and some research technicians. In that respect, they resemble workers in animal shelters, found by my colleague Robert Roop to have the highest levels of burnout and compassion fatigue of any “care-giving” professionals yet surveyed.
We have found that laboratory animal facilities tend to encourage their staff to block or remove emotional reactions from their professional lives because “scientists must be objective”. Thus, normative behaviour for laboratory personnel would involve not naming any laboratory animals, not becoming attached to the animals in any way, and certainly not treating any of them as pets. Yet most laboratory animal facilities contain one or more “pets”.
From Gill Langley,
Why call animal technicians, who conduct many of the painful and distressing procedures inflicted on laboratory animals, “animal carers”?
A naive reader would imagine that all laboratory animals survive experiments in good health, and live comfortably into old age before being finally euthanased by grieving staff. In fact, Larry the rabbit at Michigan State University was completely atypical. In recent years some of his fellow experimental subjects have endured experimentally-induced atherosclerosis with deliberately triggered thromboses, while others had their knee joints damaged by blunt trauma (equal to a 1.5kg weight dropped from a height of 40cm) and were then forced to run on treadmills.
Omitting any mention of the suffering caused to animals during experimental procedures, the technicians seemed to care only about the moment of euthanasia. What a bizarre reversal of priorities that animal technicians, who freely apply for and continue with their jobs, should seek emotional support for the remorse and grief they cause themselves by harming and killing animals, albeit in the name of science.
Rather than wasting resources on commemorative services, more would be achieved by replacing animal research and testing methods with humane alternatives. That way, animals, human patients and technicians would all benefit.
Hitchin, Hertfordshire, UK
Bubble trouble
We are told that rogue “bubble” universes could blow us all up (29 March, p 11). There is a more interesting scenario.
Suppose that after any big bang it takes 13.7 billion years before an intelligence develops sufficiently to investigate what happened at its particular big bang, and this intelligence then tries to simulate conditions that constituted the big bang (as we are doing at CERN). Not entirely unpredictably, this risks causing another big bang.
The outermost bits of the previous universe, because of inflation, would have spread beyond the reach of the destructive effect of the following big bang. The result would be continual creation.
This hypothesis offers an explanation of why we might be the most advanced civilisation detectable in our universe, and thus of why we have not been visited by a more advanced one. Any more advanced civilisation would have blown us away.
Perhaps the pope was right for two reasons when he told Stephen Hawking that we should not investigate the moment of creation. First, we would destroy ourselves. Secondly, if we initiated a new universe in which intelligence could develop, we would by our own destruction become their creator: gods, you might say. What a way to go!
English will survive
Michael Erard’s article on English missed some important points (29 March, p 28). English changed far more between the times of Chaucer and Shakespeare than between Shakespeare’s and our own. That’s why Chaucer needs to be “translated” but many people can read Shakespeare.
It is hard for a language to break up into dialects when everyone sees or hears it presented in standardised form, and when there is a need for international communication. We now have not just printing but global media 鈥� the internet and TV 鈥� propagating such standards.
Erard describes how Latin broke down into the Romance languages, and suggests that English might do the same. But Latin also remained an intact language for another thousand years, because it was needed for communication across Europe. The classical Roman poet Virgil (or Vergil) would have been shocked by much of the Latin of the medieval schools, but he would have been able to understand it, with a bit of updating of the vocabulary.
Capturing carbon
Assuming that the proponents of carbon sequestration are honest and serious, Fred Pearce’s analysis of the pointlessness of their endeavours should go a long way towards convincing them that they are on the wrong track (29 March, p 36).
As they all have impeccable credentials in business, politics and even science, I wouldn’t dream of questioning either their qualifications or their honesty. A nagging thought remains, however.
What if there were proponents of carbon capture who were not honest? All the arguments Pearce advances to counter it would then be seen to work in their favour.
They would not mind the decades of inaction caused by endless testing, nor would they object to the costs of this and other research 鈥� which would benefit aspects of their industry and be paid for by the state. Nor would they mind if their project failed, because these are, with few exceptions, the very people who have denied the existence of global warming, at least here in Australia where the coal industry is massively influential.
From Owen Jordan
Fred Pearce omitted two crucial points. First, carbon sequestration shares with nuclear power the indefensible moral position of forcing future generations to deal with the consequences of our greed for energy. That’s the easy bit.
Secondly, Pearce perpetuates the myth that as much as two-thirds of the emissions of climate-change gases will be captured if carbon capture and storage is put in place at the power station. Dream on!
Most coal today comes from opencast workings. Emissions, primarily of methane, CO2 and carbon monoxide, start as soon as the overburden above the coal seams is stripped away. Conservative estimates suggest that these gases alone account for about twice the emissions of the burning of the coal mined.
It gets worse: 98 per cent of what is dug out in an opencast coal mine is not coal, but perhaps 25 per cent (at least 10 times the amount of coal extracted) will be shale and mudstone with a carbon content of up to 50 per cent.
This cannot be burned, because of its high ash content, but it still oxidises if exposed to air. Another conservative estimate is that this carbon source has the potential to emit three or four times as much CO2 as the mined coal. Capture of CO2 at power stations therefore amounts to 5 to 10 per cent, maximum, of the emissions from the process of working and burning coal.
So carbon capture proposals share the platform with nuclear power on a second front: our ceaseless ability to construct webs of self-delusion about what we are doing to the planet, accompanied by a queue of politicians wanting us to believe them.
Cwmllynfell, West Glamorgan, UK