Premature anti-age
You report a study which found that telomere length increased in a group of 10 men with prostate cancer, who followed a healthy-living regime including a meat-free diet, exercise and yoga (21 September, p 14). But it is important to highlight the limits of these results. It was a small pilot study and the significance of the effect of these lifestyle changes on telomere length is actually quite borderline: only two or three men showed clear improvement over what can be seen in the control group.
I’m going to wait to see whether this can be replicated on a larger scale and with more sizeable effects before I get excited.
London, UK
Me medicine
Donna Dickenson writes about the threat to communal health measures posed by the growing demand to fund personalised medicine (14 September, p 26). Most patients expect that the medicine the doctor prescribed will treat the condition they are diagnosed with. The reality is, however, that the effectiveness of many licensed pharmaceuticals is measured in percentage points over that of placebos.
Consequently, many patients are exposed to potential side effects with no prospect of benefit. “Me medicine” enables better targeting and hence helps to bridge the gap between reality and patients’ expectations.
Derby, UK
Unlearned Abbott
Alas, your mention of our new Australian prime minister Tony Abbott does not even scratch the surface of his scientific ignorance (14 September, p 6). As well as his notorious comment that “the climate change argument is absolute crap”, he has suggested that and thus very hard to measure. He has compounded his party’s almost unbelievable science phobia by selecting the first in 80 years to have no person responsible for science. He has, of course, selected a minister for sport.
As a school science coordinator and member of a family where science was and is considered of great importance, I may have to resort to products resulting from the sophisticated distillation of fermented liquors to avoid despair.
Narromine, New South Wales, Australia
Indo-European roots
Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson propose that a proto-Indo-European language arose in Anatolia 9000 years ago and spread out from there together with farming (7 September, p 32). I don’t really understand their method, but there are one or two points I can raise from what I know of the history of Indo-European languages.
Your map shows an Indo-European language arriving in Britain about 3000 years ago. Didn’t farming arrive in the Neolithic, well before 1000 BC?
I read that the reconstructed proto-Indo-European resembles Lithuanian and Latvian more than any other language. That suggests an origin nearer the Baltic than Anatolia 鈥� somewhere in the Ukraine, according to the anthropologist and archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She describes barbarians from the Ukraine conquering in all directions and leaving burial mounds behind. The Celts, whose culture arose somewhere in central Europe 鈥� likely enough from those “Ukrainians” 鈥� arrived in Britain early in the first millennium BC.
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, UK
Unconscious wishes
I found Sara Reardon’s article on accessing the mind of someone with severe brain injury utterly terrifying (24 August, p 14). It is a significant but tiny step to discover that patients who are minimally conscious or in a persistent vegetative state still recognise their names.
But how can anyone with the slightest touch of compassion go on to say that, if development of the technique enables us to learn more about what they are really thinking, we need not necessarily take their thoughts into account because they may be “depressed or not emotionally healthy” and their state of mind may be “clouding their judgement”?
West Linton, Peeblesshire, UK
Just like us
I was puzzled by the idea that the machine-learning approach to artificial intelligence based on statistical analysis of big data sets was “not like us” (10 August, p 32). If there is a form of AI that is not like us, I would say it is the logical rule-based system, which appears to be based on the erroneous Enlightenment idea of humans as rational beings. We increasingly discover how supremely irrational humans can be.
Lincoln, Canterbury, New Zealand
Smoked out
There is a simple solution to issues raised by a possible Europe-wide ban on the sale of e-cigarettes from 2016, unless they have been approved as pharmaceuticals (14 September, p 6). We could ban smoking in all public places now; ban the public sale of cigarettes within six months (allowing mail order under plain cover only) and promote e-cigarettes as an aid to quitting.
It’s certainly possible to quit in two years. By 2016 hardly anyone will be smoking anyway. Then you can ban e-cigarettes, except on prescription.
Little Sandhurst, Berkshire, UK
Precise time
Thank you for the report on the new, more precise atomic clock using emissions from ytterbium atoms (31 August, p 15). Readers may be interested to know which technical advance made such a level of stability possible.
For some time now the performance of the very best atomic clocks has been limited, not by the statistics of photon emission by the atoms themselves, but by instabilities in the laser that “interrogates” the atoms, leading to “aliasing” effects in the detected signal. The recent improvement is primarily due to advances in the performance of the interrogating lasers ().
The authors propose that even higher stability can be achieved by using two atomic systems with overlapping cycles, which would virtually eliminate the aliasing (also known as the “Dick effect”). Of course, it is only with the advent of the ultra-stable ytterbium atomic system that these statistical fluctuations become of much consequence: before then they were minor compared with those of the signal being detected.
Claremont, California, US
Refugee record
You quoted the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as saying that the war in Syria was generating the “biggest displacement crisis of all time” (14 September, p 8). This is untrue.
In 1945, when the Nazi regime was defeated, the number of its former forced labourers exceeded 6 million. Another 4 million people were displaced by the war. Between March and September 1945, around .
London, UK
<i>The editor writes:</i>
鈥� Also, estimates of the number of people displaced in the partition of British India in 1947 range from to million.
Photons in flatland
I have also thought along the same lines as reader Lerida Arnold, that entangled photons aren’t in some sense actually divided, even though we view them as such (17 August, p 30). But it is not necessary to invoke extra dimensions on their behalf.
Imagine that we coalesce the Cartesian x, y, z axes into one, leaving a “space-time” in two dimensions: space and t. Considering the relatively peculiar nature of light, it is possible that photons may indeed not recognise one of these “dimensions”, either “space” or “t“. In that case, entangled photons are actually still coalesced on that axis.
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Light comes first
In his letter, Wilken Sporys reflects on the idea that for an object “travelling” at the speed of light, space and time are effectively zero (31 August, p 31). Sporys concludes that time and space only emerge as an object slows below the speed of light.
That thought poses questions, such as what do we mean by the speed of light? And what does it mean to slow down? I wonder whether it might be more productive to regard space and time arising from what light does, rather than consider light travelling within space and time?
Gowerton, Swansea, UK
Family planning
The argument that people in developed countries who desire more children will become more numerous with each generation, although making sense superficially, seems a bit naive (14 September, p 31). Grass with legs could run away from cows; all grass should have legs by now; yet I still haven’t seen grass with legs.
People are programmed to want sex, and that’s how children arrive. Furthermore, once the children are here, we are programmed to take care of them. If we look at it this way, humans should have died out with the invention of contraception. This didn’t happen, so apparently we still miss children if they don’t appear spontaneously, and that’s why we plan them. So how many do we plan? One child might be lonely, so the answer must be two.
Is there an inborn tendency in some people to want more children? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Most third children I know of were “accidents”.
Lausanne, Switzerland
Warning: humour
Surely, in the interests of health and safety, signs like the one highlighted by Feedback on the Australian beach reading “WARNING: Water” (13 July) should have an adjacent sign reading: “WARNING: delegating your ability to assess risk to writers of warning signs can be bad for your health”.
Aberdeen, UK
Ave Maria!
You referred to “the smaller Ligeia and Punga mares” on Titan (2 March, p 19). Clearly you intend a plural of mare, Latin for “sea”. But the Latin plural is maria and this word isn’t even half-Anglicised. If perchance our aliens speak Latin, they would feel quite at home among the maria.
Pretoria, South Africa