Condolences and green funeral suggestions (1)
Graham Lawton, we feel something of your loss of your beloved wife Clare; our hearts go out to you.
On the subject of green funerals, my husband was a co-editor of the book Biochar for Environmental Management and says one good option is to pyrolyse a body to turn it into charcoal. That is what I want to happen to my remains.
I hope that, after my funeral and when my biocharred body has cooled down, my friends will take some charcoal home to use in their garden soil. This will help store carbon away from the atmosphere and build soil health.
Condolences and green funeral suggestions (2)
I was immensely moved by Graham’s farewell to his wife Clare. So sorry for your loss, Graham, and for the terrible condition Clare faced. I was also so impressed that Graham could find the science behind this personal tragedy.
I, too, would like a green, woodland burial. Even though I hope it is a way off, I will start looking for a site. One may be easier to find where I live than in London, but they still aren’t nearly available enough.
Condolences and green funeral suggestions (3)
A good alternative to a regular burial, green burial or cremation is natural organic reduction. This digests bodies to create a nutrient-dense soil to enrich conservation land, forests or gardens.
Leaked gas should of been allowed to burn
I hope we never see anything like the Nord Stream gas pipeline leaks again. But if we do, I suspect that even uncontrolled partial burning would be better climate-wise than a release of pure natural gas. It should have been ignited.
Could US-style headgear protect against dementia?
You report that international rugby union players face a higher risk of dementia than the general population. This may be naive, but it seems to me that the risk of brain injury in rugby players could be greatly reduced by requiring them to wear protective helmets, as they do in American football.
Call off the return to the moon at our peril
Some letters have suggested that space exploration of various types shouldn’t go ahead for financial or environmental reasons.
There may be consequences to reducing NASA’s remit that would make these aims futile. For one, the threat of unemployment for scientists and engineers. A country with ambitions for a crewed space programme could offer specialists attractive packages to relocate and train others in all aspects of space science and engineering.
And would private space firms stop their activities if clients like NASA and the European Space Agency were being starved of funds? They could open branch offices in countries that couldn’t afford their own space programme, but that would love to have a high-tech industry partly based there. These companies could then seek clients, ranging from governments to commercial enterprises, without facing the restrictions their former nations might have imposed on them.
Worries remain about genetically modified seed
I read with interest Clare Wilson’s article on the genetic engineering of food 15 October, p 51, centred on her desire to acquire seeds from genetically modified purple tomatoes.
I am sure modified farmed foods are safe. However, I worry that GM seed companies might one day include a terminator gene in engineered varieties that would make seeds harvested from the crop “ungrowable”, so more seed has to be bought each year. Could this genetic code somehow get into non-GM crops?
If so, all crops could lose the ability to self-generate from year to year. In disaster situations in which monopolistic GM firms disappeared or raised prices drastically, millions could starve.
That chance helps shape us is no big surprise
I don’t understand why anyone would be surprised that a significant part of our variability, especially in brain function, is down to chance.
Our DNA has about 3 billion base pairs, each of which encodes two bits of data. Even if all of this were significant, that isn’t enough data to exactly describe the details of even a small part of a person’s brain structure and connectivity, let alone their whole body.
There are already a number of human attributes known to be at least partially random, such as fingerprints and iris and retina patterns, to name just a few. Considering how our bodies and brains form, and how they wire themselves up, it would be impossible for these structures to be entirely determined genetically.
Magnetism could also explain space mysteries
Stuart Clark’s excellent article “Our magnetic universe” stated that nuclear fusion “relies on strong magnetic fields to trap energy and heat” and that this “unexpected ability of the [galactic] magnetic fields to trap heat could solve the puzzle of the inexplicably hot intracluster medium in galaxy clusters”. This is consistent with ideas that the magnetic fields near our sun’s surface are trapping heat and causing the solar atmosphere to rise to temperatures of millions of degrees, while the sun’s surface is only in the thousands 鈥� this is still a mystery.
One idea for why jabs cut risk of long covid
Michael Edelstein wonders why vaccination reduces symptoms of long covid. Could it be that long covid occurs because a bad bout of covid-19 occupies the immune system to such a degree that an underlying infection can manifest? If so, would it be worth asking what kind of latent infection could behave like this?
Findings suggest that the vaccine might cushion the toll covid-19 takes on the body. This might leave many people with a greater immune capacity to resist severe long covid developing.