Name game
I am pleased that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has pledged to pay heed to public opinion when naming celestial bodies (24 August, p 7). I only wish it had done so sooner.
I was a member of the first crewed flight around the moon. In training, I chose names for a few of the unnamed craters along our orbital track. These included America, Kennedy and Houston, as well as the names of crew (Borman, Lovell and Anders) and NASA colleagues and leaders.
These were recorded on our lunar orbital map and used during the mission. I had picked a small but well-formed crater just over the lunar horizon to be “Anders”, since it could not be seen from Earth and thus had not been named by early moon gazers. However, a spacecraft directly above the crater could see Earth and thus communicate with mission control.
I thought these names would have some priority, but when the IAU honoured our crew with crater names, it picked three craters that were not only well out of sight of our orbital track, but also in darkness at the time of our mission.
I wrote to the IAU to try to correct this and even included the flight map. I got brushed off by its bureaucracy 鈥� and never got my map back.
East Sound, Washington, US
More humane war
I would like to make some corrections to your article on drug trials carried out by the US Department of Defense on volunteer army personnel (3 August, p 6). I was involved in the trials at Edgewood Arsenal until 1971, not “during much of… the 70s” as you say. Our standards were as high, or higher, than those in many psychoactive drug tests by pharmaceutical companies today.
About 7000 volunteers made it through initial screening for Edgewood, out of more than 20,000 applicants from army posts. Approximately 2500 received chemical agents. The “tens of thousands” of tests you mention would include other establishments.
A few hundred volunteers received low to medium doses of LSD at Edgewood, compared to the amounts used recreationally by millions of young civilians during the same period. Because of the unpredictable emotions and behaviour that occurred during the tests, it was concluded that enemy personnel who had been exposed to the drug might still be able to use guns. LSD was therefore never “weaponised”, as you stated.
Finally, Frank Rochelle’s recollection of using a razor blade to remove insects from under his skin cannot be accurate: volunteers were prevented from having access to sharp objects. Our nurses and technicians constantly observed subjects, in safely padded rooms, to ensure they came to no harm.
Santa Rosa, California, US
Vaccine benefits
In his look at the wider benefits of vaccines, Michael Brooks describes type 1 and type 2 helper T-cells as competitive, with levels of one going down as the other goes up (17 August, p 38). He then describes a hypothesis that vaccines reduce allergies by boosting type 1 helper T-cells, reducing the number of type 2, which are geared to fight parasitic worms in the gut and are associated with allergies.
This leaves me with a puzzle. Why are tapeworms, which presumably jazz up type 2 helper T-cells, also considered to be effective against some allergies?
Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, UK
<i>The editor writes:</i>
鈥� Parasitic worms secrete chemicals that damp down our type 2 immune response in order to promote their own survival. This has the benefit for their human hosts of reducing allergic reactions.
Virtual zombies
The creation of a new form of intelligence that humans can’t understand (10 August, p 32) might herald the appearance of “zombies” 鈥� intelligent entities that can do everything a human can but which are not conscious.
The prospect of witnessing them discussing consciousness and giving every appearance of knowing what they are talking about is intriguing.
Hull, East Yorkshire, UK
Safety in numbers
The best defence against being tagged with nanocrystals sprayed by drones controlled by border guards, police or the army (24 August, p 19) would surely be to hide in a crowd. If that fails and you become the only person tagged, thwart the system by coating lots of other people and vehicles with the spray, assuming you could get hold of it.
York, UK
International park
Beth O’Leary discusses calls to create a national park to cover the Apollo landing sites on the moon (24 August, p 27). You can play with words, but a US national park is always going to be seen as just that 鈥� a park that belongs to the US, and most of the world will take issue with it. The area is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. These are British terms, but I’m sure similar, international terms could be thought of. Perhaps a UNESCO Out-of-this-World Heritage Site?
Penzance, Cornwall, UK
Vacuous transport
Elon Musk proposes a Hyperloop transport system to link San Francisco and Los Angeles, carrying passengers inside pods, enclosed within a tube. A fan is to provide air for passengers, and create a compressed-air film beneath the “skis” on which the pods run. This may work in a tube at 0.1 per cent of atmospheric pressure while the carriages are moving (17 August, p 7), but at rest? A fan won’t function in that near-vacuum, and passengers will be starting from rest.
Kenilworth, Warwickshire, UK
Fecund evolution
Andy Robinson and John Long point out that contraception tilts the reproductive balance towards those genetically programmed to want children, so in the long run it can do nothing to prevent runaway population growth (20 July, p 28 and 3 August, p 31). This point has been made before, most famously by Garrett Hardin in his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” ().
It is fast becoming a testable prediction: the birth rate in a given country should start to rise about two generations after the contraceptive pill becomes widely available there. We are seeing this. Four years ago, Mikko Myrskyl盲 and colleagues noted a “puzzling” uptick in some Western countries’ birth rates, but speculated that it was due to prosperity passing some critical threshold ().
Believing that educated choice will prevail is like hoping the obesity epidemic can be solved if those who diet successfully are selectively removed from the population every generation.
Oxford, UK
Cell count
Reader Martin McCann suggests that there may have been four Hadley cells in the Northern hemisphere, and four in the Southern, in the mid-Cretaceous (17 August, p 31). Not four, but possibly five. Adjacent cells rotate in opposite directions, and air will always rise at the equator and descend at the poles. It follows that there can only be an odd number in each hemisphere.
Sydney, Australia
Causality with care
Both George Ellis and Francis Crick can be right in their apparently contradictory claims about whether causality is “top down” or “bottom up” (17 August, p 28), if their claims are expressed carefully enough.
Reality apparently consists of a small number of basic ingredients, which obey simple relationships with immensely complex consequences. Any given situation gives rise in principle to a simultaneous solution of the relevant relationships. So it is true to say that those ingredients and those relationships are a complete causal explanation of each and every individual solution 鈥� the “reductionist”, bottom-up claim.
On the other hand, when the basic ingredients are in a specific context 鈥� when they are arranged in particular structures subject to particular constraints 鈥� the space of possible solutions has certain features and relationships which can properly be described as caused by the nature of the structures and constraints in question. This is consistent with Ellis’s persuasive top-down claim.
London, UK
Beam recoil
You report ideas for laser-propelled interstellar craft (24 August, p 8). Almost 10 years ago you reported on a similar idea of spacecraft powered by beams of plasma (newscientist.com/article/dn6543). At the time, I noted that, apart from the issue of maintaining a narrow beam, there were two other problems.
First, all the research was done using ground-mounted lasers, but how would you keep an orbiting projector’s extremely narrow beam accurately aligned on a tiny dot a few billion kilometres away for years?
Secondly, this idea was all about getting the spacecraft there much faster than with a conventional rocket. But on arrival, how would it slow down to enter orbit?
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
<i>The editor writes:</i>
鈥� The proposal is to “phase-lock” the lasers to keep the beam tight 鈥� though no one has yet managed this on a large scale. And yes, you would need a laser at the other end to slow the craft down 鈥� which will make the first trip interesting.
Sign and code
James Fenton writes to ask a very reasonable question: why not use movement sensing cameras to allow computers to lip-read (20 July, p 29)?
As anyone who has learned sign language or taken a Deaf Awareness course will know, even the best lip-readers at most 40 per cent of what is said from lip-reading alone.
To investigate this for yourself, ask your partner to lip-read while you mouth the words “elephant juice”. It might just make their day!
York, UK
For the record
鈥� Our report on the search for sarin in Syria should have referred to “telltale signs of nerve agent”, not of nerve damage (31 August, p 8).
鈥� Wild horses have dragged it from us that in our story on their travails in the US (31 August, p 14) Dustin’s surname should have been Hollowell, and Robert Garrott is at Montana State University.