Power to the farmers
Your article on the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) assesses the success of the scheme on its own terms: fertiliser sold, “improved” seed varieties grown and farmers accessing credit (6 September, p 12). Yet AGRA is failing to prove its direct impact on poverty and nutrition.
What’s more, the scheme makes poor farmers reliant on expensive and unsustainable farming inputs, and hence they need credit to pay powerful corporate seed and fertiliser companies. Many small farmers buying these products fall into dangerous levels of debt. AGRA also advocates policy changes that shift control of seeds and land to big corporations, and away from small family farmers.
Aid donors should support projects that build food systems controlled by farmers for their communities. Africa’s poorest should benefit, not corporations.
London, UK
Anti-afterlife dogma
Can psychics contact the dead? David Silverman gives this as an example of a TV programme that cannot be serious (6 September, p 26). Yet in 1992, the BBC broadcast a series, In Search of the Dead, the second episode of which was devoted to this very question. Did the BBC slip up in commissioning this series? No, because unlike Silverman it recognised that the existence of an afterlife is a valid and important question, and one which can, in fact, be investigated scientifically 鈥� as the episode showed. Silverman asserts as a matter of faith that life cannot continue in any form after death, but a scientist should not simply presume things in the absence of proper proof.
Atheism can be a respectable position for a scientist to take if it merely takes the form of a belief that there is no god. As practised by Silverman, however, it becomes proselytising dogma masquerading as truth. In his elegant words, as he tries to persuade others to support his position: “What makes truth beautiful is that it’s true.”
Cambridge, UK
Anti-afterlife dogma
I know nothing about the TV programmes that David Silverman attacks in his advertisement for AtheistTV, but I find his attitude unscientific. His recommended response to questions such as whether ghosts exist or miracles occur is to chuckle and say “Wait. You’re not serious?” Whatever happened to the idea of examining evidence?
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Fleavolution
Rob Dunn’s report on wildlife in the great indoors (23 August, p 34) discussed insects evolving resistance to pesticides and I believe I have another example. Some groups of dog and cat fleas seem to have evolved resistance to particular antiparasitic drugs that I prescribed before I retired as a veterinary surgeon.
When I had the temerity to suggest this to visiting drug reps, my suggestion was, of course, strongly rebutted. I had three surgeries in south and east Greater Manchester, UK. In the most easterly of these, fleas had apparently evolved resistance to one widely advertised product. The reps suggested that the pet owners were not applying the product correctly, but another product used in exactly the same way worked perfectly well.
As with acquired bacterial antibiotic resistance, I believe that this is an example of evolution happening, as the late comedian Arthur Askey might have put it, “before our very eyes”.
Llangoed, Isle of Anglesey, UK
Dial M for mystery
Amanda Gefter says every book and article she consulted gave the same answer to the question “What does the M in M-theory mean?”: “nobody knows” (19 April, p 47). She finally tracks down Edward Witten, who reveals: “the M stood for magic, mystery or membrane, according to taste” 鈥� as he did in my 快猫短视频 article “Theory of Everything” (Instant Expert, 4 June 2011).
In the period between the superstring revolution of 1984 and the M-theory revolution of 1995, membranes were taboo. One string theorist announced that “I want to cover up my ears every time I hear the word membrane” and some organisers of the annual superstring conferences even banned the use of the “M-word”. My colleague Paul Townsend, one of the membrane pioneers, compared this with the theatrically superstitious calling Macbeth the “M-Play”.
The myth that no one knows what M stands for is just a smokescreen designed to obscure the red faces of those who ridiculed membranes (later called M-branes) but were then forced to admit they form a vital part of M-theory. Even now, Dean Rickles promises that his : From dual models to M-theory explores how M-theory came into being, but mentions “M-branes” nowhere in the book and “membranes” only in a footnote, referring to them in the text as “higher-order strings”.
London, UK
At the pointy end
Discussing the possibility of pilotless planes, you offer a graph showing that “the majority of fatal accidents are down to humans” (9 August, p 30). You do not mention how many of those pilot-induced accidents involved failed technology as a factor. For example, the 2009 crash of flight AF447 into the Atlantic was precipitated by technology that could not handle the real world environment 鈥� in which pitot tubes get iced up and fail to measure airspeed. Of four accidents you mention, three were induced by technology failing.
Also, you do not mention the accidents prevented by pilots, as when crew have encountered iced pitots, taken over manual control, and did not crash.
A few minutes observing pilots taking their regular tests in a flight simulator, which include rehearsing dealing with virtual technical failures, would show how far technology has to progress before automatics can meet safety standards.
Perth, Western Australia
Cholesterol carriage
Clare Wilson reports research on the relationship between genes for proteins that “carry bad cholesterol” and longevity (6 September, p 10). Could it be that the answer to long life lies in how cholesterol is transported in our bodies, rather than which type is carried?
My family has a long history of living into their 90s, with very high cholesterol.
San Diego, California, US
Sleep and sun cycle
You report calls for US schools to delay their opening times to 8.30 am or later (30 August, p 6). These are based on teenagers’ body clocks shifting and causing them to go to bed and wake up 2 hours later than they did previously. Because the effect is linked to body clocks, it is likely to be related to solar time rather than the time on our clocks and watches.
This could easily be tested by measuring the relative success of pupils on each side of a time zone. You would expect those living to the east of it to do better, since they start their day at a later solar time.
Benefits may also be seen when the clocks go back for the winter months, and negative effects when they go forward. This should be considered by those who argue that the UK should move forward an hour to synchronise with Central European Time.
Rayne, Essex, UK
Correction, 29 September 2014: When this letter was first published, an editing error confused the suggestion about a time-zone experiment. This has now been corrected.
Bee is for balsam
Beekeepers will have mixed feelings about a rust fungus that could be the downfall of the Himalayan balsam plant (6 September, p 4). At this time of year, when little else is available, the plant provides a valuable source of nectar and pollen for bees. The garden plant busy Lizzie (Impatiens walleriana) was devastated by a mould a few years ago, and I was relieved that it didn’t seem to affect its relative, the Himalayan balsam; but perhaps it gave the organisation the idea for fungal control.
I was taught beekeeping by my primary school headteacher, who offered us a shilling for every matchbox full of balsam seeds we collected. The plant seems, however, to have spread effectively without deliberate assistance. I have not yet discovered where my bees are finding it, but it is only this last year that I have noticed them returning to the hive covered in the white pollen characteristic of this plant.
Yealand Redmayne, Lancashire, UK
Finding their lunch
John Harvey mentions tomato seeds on the seabed off Liverpool (30 August, p 30). This reminds me of scuba diving on Boxing Day off the coast of Sussex, UK, some years ago. It was quite normal to find patches of sweetcorn derived from all those Christmas dinners that were not chewed or digested, but ejected into the sea by old sewers. Improvements in sewage treatment appear to have stopped this Yuletide event.
Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, UK
Modernist munching
I have to take issue with the “modernist” attitude of your guide to diet supplements (30 August, p 32). I accept that the information and advice works for 21st-century diets in the US and Europe, but for most of the last 10,000 years people have not had access to broccoli, bananas and Brazil nuts. Clearly ancient peasant diets supplemented by hedgerow pickings, weeds like nettles and chickweed, and uninspiring roots must have supplied the vitamins and trace elements needed to work and reproduce. Perhaps modern populations need to eat more Cochlearia danica (scurvy grass)?
York, UK
Random serve
Achieving random tennis serves to take advantage of opponents’ prejudice for order need not involve drawing segments on your watch face (6 September, p 47). A tennis coach once told me to hold the racquet handle loosely when serving. If you don’t know where the ball’s going, your opponent certainly won’t.
Purley, Surrey, UK
Fractal precedence
Your article “Sunny surprise for fusion reactors” refers to a finding of an “unexpected” fractal pattern in the turbulent solar wind (3 May, p 12). It cites a that says this is the first such observation. By chance, I came across a book by C. J. Schrijver and C. Zwaan called Solar and Stellar Magnetic Activity, “first published in printed format” by the Cambridge University Press in 2000, and on the authors refer to the same type of pattern.
Beirut, Lebanon
Facts for the birds
I was delighted to read Adrian Barnett’s positive and well-written review of my book The World of Birds (23 August, p 45). However, I have a couple of points to raise.
The largest known flying bird ever was not the seabird Odontopteryx but, as I described in my text, Argentavis, another Miocene bird and a member of a group known as teratorns. This had a wingspan up to 7.5 metres.
Also, you captioned Diane McAllister’s dramatic photograph of a young owl as a Blakiston’s eagle owl. It is, in fact, a fledgling long-eared owl. Although this widespread Eurasian and North American species is far smaller than the formidable east-Asian Blakiston’s eagle owl, by spreading its wings wide and fluffing out its plumage it looks much larger than it is. I chose that image to make this point.
Exeter, Devon, UK
For the record
鈥� We quoted researcher Fabian Suchanek: “You and I are stored in the Knowledge Vault in the same way as Elvis Presley” (23 August, p 18). Google has now responded that “The Knowledge Vault does not deal with personal information.”