Music makes us
Philip Ball writes about the universality of music (8 May, p 30). One reason that music is important to people around the globe is that making or listening to it is almost always a positive experience, be it joyful, restorative, transporting or cathartic.
This is significant in an evolutionary sense, because we big-brained creatures fret about the future and our immediate circumstances, which can lead to apprehension and depression. We are sometimes desperately in need of pleasure as a counterbalance, and this need creates a selective pressure. Music does not soothe us savage beasts, it sustains us.
From John Maddison
Music often mimics emotional speech, Ball tells us, but this is only the beginning of music’s mimicry. Many classical pieces imitate countryside sounds, birdsong in particular. And some of the sounds produced in blues, particularly with the harmonica or slide guitar, mimic the sound of trains that prevailed when that style of music was developing. The fact that those sounds are no longer relevant in modern society does not matter; they were incorporated into the music and became part of the genre, and are now recognisably the sound of the blues.
Ball also overlooked the importance of movement and context when discussing the dissonance or harmony of musical intervals. Chords sound more, or less, “tense” depending on how the intervals are placed within them. For instance, the major seventh, which is described in the article as dissonant, can be used to produce very sweet-sounding chords, especially when combined with the “dissonant” major second.
Further, a musical piece contains chord progressions, which create and release tension. This tension can be built either through dissonance or by delaying the resolution of a chord progression. There may be gainful inquiry in the level of tension preferred in the music of different cultures. Eastern cultures apparently prefer greater dissonance, and perhaps this same preference is expressed in their other art forms.
Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, UK
Exclusive editing
I was excited by the prospect of reading Ewen Callaway’s article about Neanderthals interbreeding with Homo sapiens (15 May, p 8). But I was disappointed on reading it to be left with the impression that the editorial crew involved must have been a bunch of white guys, wearing white-guy blinkers.
Callaway reports that the genetic record shows interbreeding between various members of the Homo genus, including H. sapiens with Homo neanderthalis, but only in regions around the Mediterranean and in western Europe. Despite these geographical limitations, you use the first-person plural possessive pronoun when discussing the findings: “our own DNA contains clear evidence that early humans interbred with Neanderthals”. This implies that New 杏吧原创 expects all its readers to have some Neanderthal genes 鈥� that none of its readership are of African descent. This glaring oversight in your coverage implies that you don’t have 鈥� or don’t care about retaining 鈥� African and Pacific-Asian readers.
Gene patents
Your editorial condemning gene patents describes as “tenuous” the argument that “isolating a gene upgrades it from a discovery to an invention” (10 April, p 5).
While it is true that discovering something as it exists in its natural state is not classed as an invention, isolating something and finding a practical use for it is. In the US Supreme Court’s landmark Chakrabarty decision of 1980, in which it ruled that a modified microorganism can be patented, the court noted that more than a century before, Louis Pasteur had been granted a patent for an isolated naturally occurring bacterium that had a practical application. The only difference between Pasteur’s bacteria and the nucleotide sequences in gene patents is the label “gene”, an evocative word that conjures up an image of the essence of life. In fact, these sequences of nucleotides are just like any other large compound.
As part of your argument, you report on the recent federal court finding that the patents Myriad Genetics holds on two BRCA breast cancer genes are invalid. We must remember, however, that the company would not have been able to develop tests for breast cancer without the funding it received from investors who believed that Myriad would enjoy patent exclusivity until 2015.
You assert that numerous studies conclude that gene patents inhibit biomedical innovation, referencing . However, two of the three opinion pieces in that paper conclude that evidence on whether patents impede innovation in biomedicine is, at best, ambiguous. In fact, gene patents are litigated less frequently than patents for other technologies ().
The debate on gene patents has been based a lot more on predetermined views than on supporting evidence. Your readers ought to be invited to consider the other side of this debate and the evidence in support of it.
Keep it real
Lakshmi Sandhana reports on Petimo, a robotic computer interface that, it is hoped, will protect children from the dangers of strangers on the internet by acting as an intermediary during social networking (8 May, p 22).
You quote the device’s inventor, Adrian David Cheok, as saying that he wants to use Petimo “to help develop more natural human forms of communication”. There is already has a good model for this 鈥� real people, especially parents and other caring adults.
Outside the virtual world, real communication evolves naturally. If you want to know who your child is talking to, make a personal invitation to meet that child and his or her parents. Trust your instincts: they can be a lot more accurate than any robot.
Clinical psychologist Gordon Neufeld suggests that bullying is an expected outcome of putting children too much in contact with their peers. This problem is only exacerbated by children’s use of social networking, including the devices described in your article.
Instead of looking to the technologists for elegant solutions to protecting children online, let us step up and bring our children back where they belong until they mature enough to manage something our brains and minds were not developed to live with.
In cold water
Keith Ross’s explanation for the Mpemba effect doesn’t make sense (24 April, p 25). He asserts that a container stratified with room temperature water separating ice at the top and 4 掳C water at the bottom would not have convection. That is not true: the warm layer in the middle would touch the ice, cool off and sink. In fact this convection would probably prevent the formation of ice until the entire contents were at about 4 掳C.
He also says that when supercooled and then provided with a nucleation event, previously cold water would quickly produce more ice than the previously hot water 鈥� which was contrary to what he had observed in partially frozen samples. If for some reason the cold water supercools but the hot does not, then the initially hot water could end up with a lower heat content than the initially cold water. Once it hits 0 掳C it remains around 0 掳C, and thus loses heat faster than the supercooled water which is closer to the temperature of the surrounding freezer.
It would be interesting to know what the results would be if the freezer was much colder than normal, say at -100 掳C.
From David Stevenson
A number of your readers have suggested reasons for hot water apparently freezing faster than cold water.
However, insufficient information on the experimental conditions has been supplied. For instance, if the experiment was done with tap water then the dissolved air content of the heated water will be far less. The presence of any microbubbles of air will interfere with the growth of the ice front. Does the effect still occur with degassed and demineralised water?
Newbury, Berkshire, UK
Salt seller
Franco Cappuccio and Simon Capewell make an assumption in their article on the health risks of eating salt: that what people want more than anything else is to live for a long time (1 May, p 22).
Some people consider it more important to enjoy life than to live as long as possible, and enjoying one’s food is an important part of that. If a sprinkling of salt makes my food taste better, I shall take the salt 鈥� and the consequences. Since we all have to die sometime of something, I do not think that my salt intake will put any extra burden on the medical facilities.
Tough eggs
Your article on microbes surviving in the Pitch Lake in Trinidad (24 April, p 15) reminded me of being told while on a visit there that convection currents in the asphalt create areas similar to subduction zones. In the wet season, when these areas fill with water, guppies can be found swimming there 鈥� a phenomenon mentioned by Anne Magurran and others in her study on behavioural diversity in guppies (). The fish die off when the water evaporates in the dry season, but it seems their eggs can survive the arid conditions in these crevices, because they reappear when the rains come.
Tests have reportedly shown that these guppies are capable of surviving only in the sulphur-rich waters of the Pitch Lake.
Rainbow worrier
I was dismayed to see that New 杏吧原创 has dumbed down to the extent of needing an analogy for the graph of a quadratic equation in Stephen Ornes’s article on playing pool (8 May, p 34).
He could at least have picked something the right shape. Lest we forget, a rainbow is an arc of a circle centred on the shadow of the viewer’s head, and has the same curvature all the way around. The graph of a quadratic function is a parabola, the curvature of which reduces progressively along its legs.
For the record
鈥� The experiments into the Mpemba effect, detailed in Keith Ross’s letter, were carried out by student teachers in training, not by primary school students (24 April, p 25).