Hopping meat
At the end of her article on eating kangaroos, Wendy Zukerman happily tucks into a kangaroo steak, having assuaged her conscience as to the meat’s origin (9 October, p 42). However, her assertion that kangaroo numbers “have been on the rise ever since Europeans settled in Australia around 200 years ago” is a contentious one. We do not really know if numbers have increased or not, though the range of some species may have increased.
On the subject of ethics, the article misrepresented the stance of the animal welfare group RSPCA Australia. Its official position is that females should not be killed until the welfare of young joeys is resolved.
In a 2004 paper in the journal Australian Mammalogy, David Croft, who was quoted in Zukerman’s article, that orphaned young animals are likely to die, as they are strongly dependent on their mothers for nutrition, and for learning to forage and avoiding predation.
Kangaroo shooters are portrayed in the article as good marksmen, but evidence from the Australian animal rights charity Animal Liberation indicates that this is not always the case. It has film showing carcasses in chillers with necks severed below the occipital joint, and suggests that up to 40 per cent of adults are miss-shot and are cut in a way so as to hide the evidence.
Kangaroo meat cannot be a direct replacement for livestock. To meet a fifth of Australia’s current demand for beef would require there to be kangaroo populations quite considerably greater than they are at present 鈥� an impossibility as kangaroos are free ranging and their numbers are regulated by climatic conditions. Nor would removal of sheep from grazing land increase numbers, as findings by and indicate that there is little competition between them and kangaroos.
Kangatarians should know that they are supporting another meat industry and plundering Australia’s wildlife. Without question they are also significantly damaging the animals’ welfare to an extent that is on par with the harm inflicted on Canadian harp seals.
From Paul Kail
Wendy Zukerman tells us that she suffers from anaemia, and thinks that eating kangaroo meat might improve matters. I do not see this as a reason to support the slaughter of kangaroos, during which the baby joeys are “coshed with a metal pipe” and the older ones are left to die of starvation.
She believes that she is short of iron because her diet doesn’t contain enough of it, but a more likely explanation is that she lacks vitamin B12, which is needed to absorb it. One tablet a day would be a more ethical alternative to supporting the bloodshed in Australia.
Prague, Czech Republic
The editor writes:
鈥� Although low levels of vitamin B12 can cause anaemia, the author knew this was not so in her case as her levels had already been tested.
Alpha laws
Physics can sometimes seem so confusing. First there was your report on how Petr Horava’s adaptation of Einstein’s equations can reconcile dark matter, relativity, gravity and quantum physics (7 August, p 28). And then came John Webb’s results which are compatible with fundamental “constants” such as alpha not being constants at all (23 October, p 32).
Do Webb’s results corroborate Horava’s approach, or does Horava’s approach give conceptual credibility to them? Could you publish an article tying these two together? Please.
From Geoffrey Withington
Exciting though John Webb’s data may appear when suggesting that the value of alpha, the fine-structure constant, might have varied over time, it is hardly world-shattering news.
Variations in the laws of physics, or at least news of alternative angles from which these laws might profitably be viewed, crop up all the time. Laws are not carved in stone: merely written in chalk for the moment.
Where are the laws that tell us how information was created by the big bang, and how it has been distributed around the universe since then? We have yet to formulate them. Physics is about writing, and rewriting, such laws.
Bridge, Kent, UK
From Carl Looper
If observations of alpha suggest that it is variable, then the observation invalidates the law that alpha is a constant 鈥� in other words, there may be another as yet undiscovered law that allows alpha to vary.
That the laws of physics might vary from one place to another, or over time, is just silly. If the laws of physics are anything, they are laws. Laws don’t vary. That is why they are called laws.
What we call the laws of physics are in fact our best theories. Whether they actually are the laws of physics is another question altogether.
Yarraville, Victoria, Australia
From Bill Palmer
One interpretation of John Webb’s measurements is that alpha varies over space, which Michael Brooks rightly points out would mean a radical rethink of the foundations of physics.
However, this is only one explanation of the results. Because it is the most dramatic, it is the focus of Brooks’s article, along with the implication that Webb’s results inevitably lead to this conclusion.
This is taken several stages further, to the point of blatant untruth, in the accompanying diagram entitled “The axis of alpha”, which states that “studies of quasars… have revealed that alpha is smaller on one side of the universe and larger on the other”. What it should have said is that results from these studies can be explained if alpha is smaller. Not so punchy, but at least it is true.
I have been an enthusiastic reader of New 杏吧原创 for more than 30 years and will continue to be, but I hope that your editorial team can restore the necessary balance between truth and drama.
Bath, Somerset, UK
Poetic physics
While the end of space-time may be a shocking new idea to scientists (2 October, p 6), many poets and lyricists have anticipated it. When expressing love, they often avoid over-commitment by including the caveat “till the end of time”.
Rare earth solution
There is a possible remedy to the shortage of rare earths reported by Katharine Comisso (30 October, p 14). Why not extract these elements from the red mud waste from bauxite mining?
According to a study by M. Ochsenk眉hn-Petropulu and colleagues, a tonne of red mud will contain a few kilograms of rare earth elements (). These metals could be extracted with ammonium salts.
Yttrium hydroxide is soluble in ammonium chloride and so could be extracted in solution. The residual rare earth phosphate mineral monazite, left over from the original bauxite, could be treated with alkali to yield other rare earth hydroxides.
Worldwide, 70 million tonnes of red mud are generated each year, according to the , which promotes the utilisation of this waste. Consider the potential benefits of processing it in this way.
Carbon capture
The optimism in your article on carbon capture is unwarranted (25 September, p 48).
This fledgling process is unlikely to be developed on a large enough scale in the time available to help us avert global warming. Its real function is to distract us from investing in alternative power sources and thus helps to keep the fossil fuel industry in business. Carbon capture is for the coal lobby what filter cigarettes were for the tobacco industry 鈥� a deceptive diversion.
Blithe spirit
The finding that regular churchgoers seem to be happier than people who are not religious (9 October, p 14) could be interpreted as supporting the adage that ignorance is bliss.
While secular thinkers struggle with reality, true believers have no such problem as they blithely “know” that they have the answer. Lucky them!
Cold turkey?
In her article “Junkie food”, Bijal Trivedi writes that eating junk food could be as addictive as alcohol or recreational drugs (4 September, p 38).
I, too, used to be a food junkie, and found that the best way to stop the craving was to switch to a diet of vegetables, seeds, nuts and fruits with a small amount of fish. The cravings stopped in just a week or two, and the diet was so effective that I no longer crave junk food even when it is in front of me.
Perhaps a mineral and vitamin-deprived brain becomes a malfunctioning brain. Could a fully balanced diet be the answer to food addiction and, possibly, drug and alcohol addictions too?
Fishy oils
After writing the excellent, myth-debunking article on omega-3 and omega-6 oils (15 May, p 32), Sanjida O’Connell must have been terribly frustrated to see you publish a letter from Fisheries Consultant for the Fishmongers’ Company, Clive Askew (2 October, p 24) which stated that consuming more seafood is the simple solution to omega-3/omega-6 dietary imbalances.
This is not the simple solution that he suggests, not if one takes into account the drastic and immediate problems of overfishing. Nor is it the only solution. As O’Connell reports, it is “probably fine to rely on our natural capacity for converting omega-3s from plants into the long-chain omega-3s that fish oil is so rich in”, and about a tablespoonful of rapeseed oil per day should meet the World Health Organization’s levels to avoid deficiency.
For the record
鈥� Our description of the Hampshire tree planning test (30 October, p 43) failed to make it clear that you can only move a number on or off the end of a branch of the tree, and cannot slide one over another.
鈥� We said: “Each year, 75 million babies are born” (6 November, p 32). That is the increase in population; the number of babies born is .
鈥� The skinks whose sex-determination Ido Pen and colleagues studied (30 October, p 18) was Niveoscincus ocellatus, not N. greeni.
鈥� The correct DOI for the paper in Biological Psychiatry we mention in the article “Sins of the fathers” (6 November, p 8) is .