Brain silo
Your article on C. P. Snow’s legacy prompted me to wonder why his thesis that there are “two cultures” is considered to be false (2 May, p 26). His worries about the compartmentalisation of thought and knowledge, otherwise known as subject specialisation, still seem valid to me.
Snow’s concern was about the failure of two major cultural strands to communicate: science and the humanities. Now we have similar divisions between even closely allied disciplines. For example, while economists and ecologists both employ systems thinking, they have developed very different views of how to manage the planet. Economists favour letting the market decide, whereas ecologists contend that the market is a root of the problem.
Engineers and the expanding class of scientist-managers use scientific tools to manage critical resources such as water. Yet they invariably relate to specialist scientist colleagues as mere service providers.
Day to day, I see little organic communication between environmental engineers like me and the social-science oriented folks in the environmental studies institute just 10 metres along the corridor.
I am unclear as to why these barriers arise. Certainly it’s not malice. Perhaps it’s the result of information overload, apathy, or a lack of time. Or perhaps it is a reflection of our built environment. We don’t have intimate Oxford pubs where writers and lab rats can rub shoulders and share a drink. The best we can manage is to have shared toilets.
Your carbon ration
Catherine Brahic’s online article, “Humanity’s carbon budget set at one trillion tonnes” (www.newscientist.com/article/dn17051) implies a frightening statistic. If we are to collectively emit no more than 250 billion tonnes of carbon in order to reduce the probability of a 2 掳C warming to 25 per cent, then for today’s population we each have only 36 tonnes left that we can ever emit. Given the rate at which some individuals could exceed this it seems pointless to get too bogged down questioning the accuracy of the estimate.
Implementing a personal cap on emissions would be an interesting challenge. To decarbonise your lifestyle to comply with a 36-tonne carbon ceiling would require you to be extremely frugal, and treat every purchasing decision as a careful strategic investment.
This should be more than just a thought experiment. Previous articles on the flaws of carbon trading, and the difficulties of finding a price for the “final tonne” that would tip us over the edge, suggest that a carbon budget would not abate emissions. Yet somehow we have to find a way to achieve a low-carbon economy and adopt low-carbon lifestyles.
Fish that see red
The underwater photographs taken by Nico Michiels, revealing that the eyes of some deep-sea fish glow red, will strike an eerie chord with many optical engineers (4 April, p 38).
The red fluorescence around gobies’ eyes reminded me of a similar arrangement used in CGI filming. A ring of monochromatic LEDs surrounds the camera lens, emitting light that is reflected back from tags on an actor’s suit. Best performance is obtained by squeezing the light sources as closely as possible round the lens and using a wavelength that would otherwise not be present.
There are many natural arrangements that reflect light back towards its source. Translucent spherical glass beads on the lunar surface make the full moon anomalously bright. Cats’ eyes are an evolved example.
Maybe the strange effects one sees with an underwater camera and searchlight could be explained if some marine life has similar retro-reflecting features. If so, Michiels may have found something more remarkable than just intraspecies signalling: his gobies may have evolved a “radar-like” sense that uses light rather than sound.
Lost in publication
The front cover of your 9 May issue flaunts the headline: “The mysterious monopole 鈥� predicted by theory, hunted for decades, found at last”. Exciting news, I thought, until I reached the cover story inside and found a very different description: “They are not exactly the monopoles of physics lore, but they could provide us with essential clues as to how those legendary beasts behave” (p 28).
Since the monopole was “found” on the front cover, but apparently lost again by page 28, my wife suggested I carefully check the intervening pages in case it was lurking there, but sadly there was no sign of it.
I understand that the front cover of a magazine needs to be attractive and to tempt the reader, but does New 杏吧原创 really need to exaggerate what its articles offer simply to compete with other magazines?
Barrage alternatives
Reading Fred Pearce’s article on the Severn barrage, it strikes me that there are viable alternatives (18 April, p 32).
Imagine a steel tank 150 metres long by 100 metres wide, open at the bottom, and anchored to the seabed at a depth where its top is above water at high tide and its bottom remains below water at low tide. The water level could rise and fall freely inside the tank, forcing air out or in through a vent in the top. The 13-metre tidal range in the Severn estuary would result in an average of 4.5 cubic metres of air per second passing through the vent, and this could be used to drive a turbine.
Such a device could generate electricity both when the tide is rising and the air is being driven out, and when it is falling and air is being sucked in again. The only idle periods would occur when the tide is turning.
Hectares of offshore power units could be installed with little environmental impact, supplying power for as long as the moon circles the Earth.
From Brian Pollard
Fred Pearce reports that the Severn barrage can generate about 5 per cent of the UK’s electricity. Even plans to build thousands of wind turbines offshore will only provide 30 per cent. As electricity at present provides only about one-eighth of the country’s energy, when manufacturing and transport are included, these two renewable energy sources together would supply only about 4 per cent of the UK’s total needs.
One might therefore ask why we are we bothering with such giant and disruptive projects. Far more significant is the question of how to produce the other 96 per cent of the energy we use now.
There are only two technologies available today that can provide sustainable, long-term energy on the necessary scale: nuclear power, using fast breeder reactors, and large-scale solar power, generated near the equator.
The Gemasolar scheme, under construction in south-west Spain, shows how solar power can supply power constantly, by using a phase-change salt to store heat from the sun during the day and release it during the night.
Find ways to supply the missing 96 per cent, and we won’t need to build any more wind turbines or dam up any estuaries.
Andover, Hampshire, UK
Detrimental bans
David Robson’s article on the zeal of the anti-smoking lobby was rather more cautious than it could have been (4 April, p 34).
I have spent years looking for published evidence that environmental tobacco smoke is dangerous to health, but have failed to find any. We see plenty of papers on the presence of cotinine in people exposed to tobacco smoked by others, but there are other toxic components in smoke. The levels of these substances in non-smokers exposed to tobacco smoke are conservatively estimated to reach 1/500th of the dose inhaled by smokers.
Such findings have particular relevance here in Western Australia because of a recent bill outlawing tobacco smoking in pavement dining areas and in cars when children are travelling.
There needs to be unbiased study into the socially disruptive effects of anti-smoking campaigns: for instance, the effect of the campaign on obesity and dementia, and the effect on the use of other psychoactive drugs such as cocaine and cannabis.
Many people in anti-smoking campaigns will mean well, but the involvement of well-financed and powerful groups could affect coverage of the evidence that environmental tobacco smoke has no significant detrimental effects on health.
A hint of flint
Erich Plaut’s comments, reported in Feedback, about the absurdity of comparing the taste of wine to that of stone (9 May) show that he was never a student of geology in the 1970s. My father told me it was common practice to taste rocks to help identify them. I’m not sure his stones were crushed, but I bet my dad could tell you which sauvignon blanc tasted like a vintage fluorspar.
From Byron Rigby
What we perceive as the flavour of wine is largely composed of smell or bouquet. Traditionally, the vocabulary for describing fragrances in the bouquet of wine has been severely limited. In recent years, winemakers have followed perfumers in systematically relating smells to personal experience. This has improved the description of wine, but with the limitation that people’s smell receptors differ greatly, so not every nose will yield the same associations.
Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
From Mark Earls
Having worked on stone garden ornaments when I was employed by a landscape gardener, I know what crushed stone tastes like. Different stones and cuts have subtle differences in taste. Marble has a harsher taste than limestone, for example.
Milton Keynes, UK
Pentagonal power
It is ironic that in the week the Enigma puzzle featured a pentagon with each apex joined to a central point, Chrysler filed for bankruptcy (2 May, p 24). The Chrysler symbol is just such a pentagon.
Not nominative determinism: perhaps predictive semiology?
For the record
鈥� It must be the rising sea levels that did it: what else could have shifted southern Bangladesh a couple of thousand kilometres west of where it belongs on our map of the world’s low-lying areas (9 May, p 37)?