It flew, it dived
I was immensely entertained by Paul Marks’s article about the Pentagon’s plans for an airplane-submarine hybrid (3 July, p 32). He correctly cited Boris Ushakov’s 1934 design as an antecedent, but there is another, earlier one. The cover of Modern Mechanics for September 1930 (see photo, right) depicts a drawing of a flying sub said to be in use by the Danish navy. It resembles the Ushakov design, but has telescoping wings and art deco lines more in keeping with the flying boats produced at that time by German aircraft manufacturer Dornier. Indeed, the article suggests the flying sub may have been built by Dornier. It assures readers that the craft exists, but “pictures in the form of photographs are not available for obvious military reasons”.
Autism and guilt
Those familiar with the scientific method may be puzzled why many parents of autistic children seek interventions and therapies with no evidence base (26 June, 42). However, it is not so surprising when you consider the context of autism and parenting.
For decades, parents have been told that they are the cause of their child’s autism. The idea promoted by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in the 1960s and 70s that autistic behaviours are triggered by a mother’s emotional frigidity is still widely believed. More recently, autism has been attributed to parental genes. Thus a diagnosis of autism can trigger feelings of parental guilt.
Many parents seek to counter the notion that their child’s autism is their fault by doing whatever they can to alleviate the effects, even trying medications and interventions that have not been scientifically verified.
Increasing scientific literacy in the general population would help, as well as more government-funded health and education support services for autism. The guidelines published by the New Zealand ministries of health and education () are a good example of how governments can help.
Lay your bets
In your article on the search for the Higgs particle, it is implicitly assumed that the Higgs exists (24 July, p 8). This hope is shared by many physicists, and it was one of the main motivations for building the Large Hadron Collider. However, a small group of physicists, myself included, is challenging this view. Some have even gone so far as to bet thousands of dollars that it doesn’t exist (though Stephen Hawking has bet only $100).
It is important to remember that the Higgs mechanism was invented in 1964 as a “fix” to give mass to the particles called vector bosons, just as dark matter was suggested as a fix to explain the velocities at which galaxies orbit each other in clusters. Neither of these entities has been found.
Boil in the bog
Your article on the origins of cooking suggested that early humans acquired a taste for food that had accidentally fallen into a fire, and that they then learned to control fire to cook (17 July, p 12). Could a taste for cooked food have started among people living in geothermal areas? I imagine that hunters would have tried to retrieve prey that ran into steaming hot pools.
One method of cooking in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands is to steam food by burying it with heated stones. Perhaps this also derived from living in areas with naturally occurring hot rocks?
Think big on climate
In his article on geoengineering solutions to climate change, Clive Hamilton criticises our promotion of “market-driven solutions” (17 July, p 22).
Here at the Carbon War Room, we are monitoring the debate on geoengineering, but are primarily focused on the 50 per cent of climate change solutions that can be implemented profitably using existing technology. These are either not put into practice quickly enough or on a large enough scale, due to market failures that we aim to overcome.
The vast majority of those of us looking for climate change solutions are clear that the priority is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Geoengineering should never be used as an excuse to limit those efforts. We are working to accelerate those opportunities where the world can save money and the planet at the same time.
Geoengineering is a broad subject and in many cases a misleading term. By burning fossil fuels, humankind has been engineering the climate for two centuries. Those developing climate intervention technologies are seeking either to wind back that effect by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or buy time by altering how much the sun heats up the Earth. We believe that only a few of these techniques should be left to the vagaries of the market, while riskier technologies are handled with due care and multilateral cooperation by governments and researchers.
From Sean O’Malley
There is a good reason why we should take geoengineering seriously as a solution to global warming. Simply reducing global carbon dioxide emissions may take too long to avoid a climate tipping point, after which no amount of carbon reduction will return temperatures to pre-industrial levels.
Many greens use the threat of a tipping point to encourage a rapid reduction in emissions. Yet you could equally use this threat to justify geoengineering, since this is more likely than carbon reduction to help us avert or undo the effects of any tipping point: it would work more quickly and its effects would be more far-reaching.
Environmentalists’ bias against geoengineering is as bad as the oil industry’s bias against carbon reduction. Fixing the climate is not going to be easy; dismissing potential solutions out of hand will make it all the harder.
Tucson, Arizona, US
Lost in translation
Reg Clough is sceptical about Christine Kenneally’s assertion that the language Lao, which is spoken in Laos, has no adjectives (24 July, p 26). But it is Clough who is wrong.
In my reference grammar of that language, based on 17 years of fieldwork, I show that Lao has a full complement of property-denoting words that have been translated into English as adjectives such as red, good and old. However, I also show that these property-denoting words belong to a single verb class in Lao. This verb class also includes action-denoting words like run, see and break. A tourist guided by English translations is likely to be under the impression that Lao has adjectives. Fortunately, linguists with technical research methods at their disposal are not constrained by first impressions.
The greenest cows
In his article about the consequences for the planet of eating meat, Bob Holmes says that grain-fed beef cows emit 24 kilograms less methane per year than grass-fed beef cows, and therefore have a lower environmental cost (17 July, p 28).
While this is true, () shows that if you take into account the energy used in cultivating, planting, harvesting, carting and drying grain, not to mention heating and cooling housed livestock and the carbon released from the soil during cultivation of grain, the grass-fed livestock come out a lot more environmentally friendly.
Travelling back
The suggestion that we could be living inside a black hole (24 July, p 9) echoes work done by the Austrian mathematician Kurt G枚del in the 1940s. G枚del demonstrated the existence of paradoxical solutions to Albert Einstein’s field equations in general relativity, in which a rotating universe would allow time travel. This even caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory.
Salt politics
The piece “A sprinkling of doubt” (1 May, p 22) demonstrates the degree to which advocacy and subjective opinion continue to dominate the debate over salt and health. Without referring to specific publications, the authors attempt to cast doubt on researchers who have published papers contradicting the need to reduce our salt intake by linking them with the salt industry.
What they neglect to say is that many researchers who have called for salt reduction are in fact members of the activist group . That includes Franco Cappuccio, co-author of New 杏吧原创‘s piece. While there is nothing wrong with belonging to advocacy groups, contemporary ethics usually call for authors to declare any potential conflicts of interest.
WASH’s aim is “to bring about a reduction in salt intake throughout the world by reducing the amount of salt in processed foods as well as salt added to cooking, and at the table”. Yet the evidence for the health benefits of salt reduction is not clear-cut. Many studies have found that population-wide salt reduction would be beneficial, but many others have found that such measures would be ineffective or have potentially negative consequences. Even so, initiatives are under way in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia to reduce sodium consumption to 2300 milligrams per day.
The authors claim that the food industry opposes salt reduction. Much to my regret, that is not the case. The industry has embraced salt reduction, not because it believes in the science but because of public pressure.
For the record
鈥� Our neurons were clearly misfiring when describing one of four illusions we used to show how synchronisation of neurons affects vision (10 July, p 28). The brighter centre in circle C is in fact down to an increase in the firing rate of neurons, not tighter synchrony.
鈥� In our story on biometric identification using iris recognition (31 July, p 22), we inadvertently confused two statistical measures, the false match rate (FMR) and the failure-to-match rate (also called false reject rate, or FRR). This resulted in the incorrect attribution of a statement on FRR to John Daugman of the University of Cambridge, where we said iris recognition would have a real-world FRR of the order of 1 in 250 million. In fact this number describes instead the FMR, when a decision threshold is used which allows up to 31 per cent of the bits in an iris template to be corrupted while still accepting the match.