Baby blocks
EARLIER this month, we asked you how humans might be improved upon, given the mounting environmental threats to our species (2 September).
鈥淚t鈥檚 clear that human brains already exceed their optimum size at birth,鈥� says Brian Horton. The obvious solution, he says, 鈥渋s to take a few genes from marsupials, so that babies are born a few weeks after conception and immediately transferred to a pouch, where they will be safe for the next eight months鈥�.
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Brian doesn鈥檛 elucidate where these pouches will be located, but we think the idea would be popular if they were available in a range of brightly coloured fabrics from IKEA. This would allow parents to gestate their child on the shelf while they carry on life as normal in this brave new world.
The downside, of course, is that humans are already born half-baked by the standards of most of the animal kingdom. Witness the newborn gazelle, up and running in minutes, a milestone that takes us humans a year to waddle past. And given the mind-boggling 18 years or so it takes to evict a regular-born human from the nest, who knows how long it will take for these Huxleyan hatchlings to fly the coop?
鈥淛o Spencely is in two minds about whether to visit a local studio offering 鈥淨uantum Yoga鈥�. Might this be where you can learn superpositions?鈥�
A hot idea
MEANWHILE, Klaus Mogensen chimes in with a strategy to mitigate the effects of climate change 鈥� or rather, to mitigate our intolerance to them. 鈥淚t is difficult for the body to get rid of excess heat if the outside temperature exceeds that of the body,鈥� he says, 鈥渁nd some equatorial regions may become too warm to be habitable.鈥�
Klaus proposes engineering humans to maintain a higher body temperature: 鈥淭his would probably imply burning more calories, simultaneously reducing problems with obesity.鈥�
Feedback spies a problem: for those of us living in cooler climes, the world would feel even chillier than it does now. So aside from leading to more arguments over the office thermostat, we would habitually keep our central heating on a higher setting, burning more even energy and hastening global warming.
After a few decades of this, the world would warm enough that we had no choice but to bump up human body temperature again, and, well, you get the picture.
Gimme shelter
OF COURSE, with the latest big bang under North Korea shaking up regional geopolitics, perhaps we should stop worrying about the melting ice caps and focus on a more immediate kind of climate change.
Unfortunately, we aren鈥檛 sure what sort of modifications would allow humans and a rain of nuclear fire to peacefully co-exist. Before we head to the shelters, Feedback recommends training cockroaches to keep things running in our absence. At least the gestating babies will be nicely matured once things cool off.
Queen of code
NINA BAKER is desperately seeking a Susan, or any woman, who has been immortalised as a scientific unit (10 June). Mike Ellis recalls that in the 1960s, long before the Ada programming language was created, he worked on the Royal Navy鈥檚 early digital information system known as Action Data Automation, or ADA. 鈥淭his was deliberately contrived to celebrate Ada Lovelace, who thus became both eponym and acronym 鈥� a double whammy for women.鈥�
Score one for the women
AND finally bringing us something verging on a unit is John Davies, who tells us of the Apgar score used globally to assess the physiological condition of newborn babies.
鈥淭his provides an invaluable means of comparison, for research on procedures and treatments, as well as monitoring the progress of resuscitation,鈥� says John. 鈥淚t is named after its originator, Virginia Apgar, a US obstetric anaesthetist.鈥�
The holy kale
CATCHING up on local news in Adelaide, Australia, Jo Hamilton discovers the lifesaving potential of eating her greens: 鈥淎s little as three serves of fruit and vegetables a day should be enough to stave off heart attacks, stroke and death 鈥� and any more offers no benefit, a new study has found.鈥� We wonder what extra benefit could top immortality.
Faux Bordeaux
FURTHER to John Cartmell鈥檚 observation that homeopathic remedies could be labelled on demand (26 August), James Fradgley recalls that the Russians got there first. 鈥淪hortly after the collapse of the USSR, I was asking about the wines a Russian supplier had, and the reply was: 鈥榃hat do you want?'鈥�
James then discovered that the supplier printed the labels after getting an order, on the assumption that the buyer wouldn鈥檛 know the difference.
As the crow flies
A STRETCH of the imagination: 鈥淚 was pleased to note that the distance from shore of DONG Energy鈥檚 proposed offshore windfarm HornSea 3 is officially measured in one of the most internationally recognisable units,鈥� says Sam Millard. 鈥渋.e. 鈥榯hree times the distance from Norwich to Cromer鈥�.鈥�
For US readers, that would be about twice the distance from Roswell to Artesia. Clear?