Cultivating trust
We welcome the debate over Environment Secretary Owen Paterson’s call for the UK to embrace genetically modified crops (newscientist.com/article/dn23730). We agree the UK can be a centre for research excellence, and must play its part in ensuring sustainable food security for itself and the rest of the world.
But what is needed is a balanced approach that maximises the long-term public and environmental good. GM crops promise to feed the world 鈥� for example, through varieties tolerant to drought and salt. However, most varieties have been developed for just two traits 鈥� herbicide and pest resistance. As Andy Coghlan points out (15 June, p 8), insects evolving resistance to plants modified to contain pesticide means these traits may cause more problems than they solve.
Because the effects could be so detrimental to the environment, we support the firm application of the precautionary principle. Gaining public trust will need robust, evidence-led and transparent processes. The government should urge agribusiness to publish the likelihood of known negative effects in their trials. This is the only way to build trust.
Security needs
The backlash over monitoring of online data by security services in the US and UK is highlighted in your editorial (15 June, p 5) and also in Hal Hodson’s article on how to avoid governments snooping on you (p 21).
But governments cannot provide security without surveillance. If voters are happy with being significantly less secure but having more privacy, then fine. However, I suggest this would change after a couple of terrorist incidents.
This is not to advocate that there should be no safeguards, or that police-state surveillance should be the norm. The problem is that the politicisation of the leak that revealed such surveillance has caused many people to lose all perspective.
It is clear that the US National Security Agency is run by ageing hippies. One only has to read the “Split the difference” box in Hodson’s story and recall the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and the code name Project Prism instantly springs to mind.
Craigie, Western Australia
Climate hope?
It is great to see US president Barack Obama showing leadership on climate change (newscientist.com/article/dn23758). But without the support of Congress for new federal legislation, he is fighting with one hand tied behind his back.
The show that greenhouse gas emissions in the US in 2011 were 6.9 per cent below 2005 levels, compared with Obama’s target of 17 per cent by 2020. But they are still more than 8 per cent above 1990 levels, the international baseline.
Moreover, this means Americans emit more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases per person each year. If the world is to have a reasonable chance of avoiding dangerous global warming of more than 2 掳C, emissions will have to average no more than 2 tonnes per person by 2050. I hope Obama will take the argument to the American people and challenge the Republican party, which is in a state of denial about climate change.
Four's a crowd
You report “evidence” for potential particles dubbed tetraquarks (29 June, p 16). It is true there is nothing in nature that prohibits particles made up of more than three quarks. However, the presently accepted theory says that quarks come in threes to make a baryon such as a proton or neutron, or in quark/antiquark pairs to make short-lived mesons.
If this tetraquark turns out to be a true particle made of four quarks and not just two mesons tightly bound, then quantum chromodynamics, the part of the standard model of particle physics that describes the strong force, will indeed need reformulating.
Free debate
Barry Chapman, in his letter disputing the existence of free will, writes that the firing of a neuron “will have a cause and that cause will have another cause, all the way down” (29 June, p 31). But this is not a law of science. Events on the quantum scale obey the laws of probability not causality.
If living things can “harness chance”, as Peter Ulric Tse puts it (8 June, p 28), then they can move the odds a bit in favour of free will.
I read Tse’s take on free will with interest, but I don’t see how his ideas solve anything. His claim is that we have free will because consciousness can freely adjust neuronal weightings, affecting the way they fire in the future.
But how does this reweighting happen? All the usual philosophical problems apply, such as what is the nature of this free consciousness? All Tse has actually achieved is to find another way to sweep the issue under the ontological carpet.
Fissile future
Jochen Flasbarth is wrong to say the world does not need fission reactors (18 May, p 24). It is not fission reactors that are wrong per se, but the prevailing use of boiling and pressurised water solid-fuelled reactors. It does not make sense to put water under pressure and elevated temperature into the core of a reactor when it can be avoided.
If the safer thorium-fuelled molten salt reactor developed in the late 1960s had been adopted for electric power, no one would have heard of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi.
Desk-bound
There is no satisfactory, let alone easy, solution to the health problems created by excessive time spent sitting behind a desk described by Richard A. Lovett (29 June, p 44). As with similar messages from the medical fraternity today, we’re left feeling annoyed and guilty.
These days it seems that just about every aspect of our lives is harming our health or will shorten our lives. If this issue of inactivity is as serious as the researchers say, then we’re in big trouble because, unlike smoking, sitting and working at desks is a cornerstone of modern life.
Moon hunt
Your interview with Didier Queloz focused on the search for exoplanets (8 June, p 27). Now that we have the technology to find extraterrestrial planets, but not yet their moons, are we in danger of forgetting a possible essential precondition for the evolution of beings like us?
The moon’s role in the development of life on Earth has long been discussed. It produces tides and the rich habitat of intertidal zones, and even stabilises the motion of the planet. Arguably these are essential factors in our coming into being.
鈥� The hunt for exoplanet moons is uppermost in the minds of some researchers 鈥� see our story from last year (newscientist.com/article/dn22368).
Long way down
I have some reservations about cable technology that would enable continuous lifts in a 1-kilometre-high skyscraper (15 June, p 23). If I were working on a floor near the top of such a building, I would be most worried about how long it would take me to get out at the end of the day. The lifts would probably spend a lot of their time below me.
You would need a service run along the lines of a small railway, with a published timetable, and the situation at street level during peak hours would be even worse. This is no doubt fertile ground for some good traffic research.
Fail-safe software
Michael Brooks’s look at the proliferation of computer languages included worries about syntactical errors in software and potential dangers (8 June, p 36). There’s no need to worry too much, because such errors are picked up by programs known as compilers. Additionally, software containing these kinds of errors is the safest of all: it won’t run.
Your editorial implied that software engineers are defending a monopoly (p 5). This is far from the case. Many languages have been designed to usher outsiders into their world. Just search the web. There is a vast store of free languages, compilers and tutorials, all written by engineers to introduce people to the art.
Pipe dreams
The mention of acute, long-term drought in the south-west US in an article by Paul Marks (15 June, p 22) prompts me to point out one solution. We have a surplus of water in the north-west US, which could be diverted to the south-west via a pipeline or aqueduct.
While some might scoff, I can remember such a project to carry water from northern to southern California. But such grand schemes no longer seem possible in the US. Our ability to apply technology to large infrastructure problems has gone, probably never to return, thanks to more than half a century of prioritising resources for the military.
Let nature be
I am perplexed by the idea of eco-offsetting 鈥� transferring wildlife from one site to another so the first site can be developed 鈥� as discussed by Fred Pearce (22 June, p 26). Surely, if a site has an important eco-benefit, the application to develop should be refused. Or develop the proposed secondary site and leave the original alone.
Aim true
Your articles on nudge, the art of subtle persuasion, used the example of the aim-inducing fly etched in urinals to ensure cleaner bathrooms (22 June, p 32). There is an earlier version: in the 19th century the picture was a bee. This combined practicality with a mild joke. The Latin for “bee” is Apis.