Ebola and bushmeat
Tennyson Williams suggests it would be opportune to use the current Ebola crisis to convince governments in the affected region to ban the consumption and smuggling of wildlife (6 September, p 26).
We fear that in a time when “paranoia and uncertainty… drive behaviours reminiscent of those during the Black Death”, as Williams states, identifying bats, chimpanzees and other species as primary sources of this terrible scourge could trigger attempts to eradicate these animals.
It also smacks of hypocrisy to ask these African governments to forbid the use of local natural resources in this way. By analogy, following the spread in the UK of BSE 鈥� aka mad cow disease 鈥� should British citizens have given up eating and trading beef once and for all?
This is not to downplay the serious impact of the eating of bushmeat on wildlife in tropical regions. To maintain clarity over which behaviours threaten wild animals and which do not, however, it is preferable to avoid lumping all domestic consumption of indigenous fauna under the term “bushmeat”. This will also help us avoid foisting culturally specific moral imperatives on others from different cultural backgrounds and economic circumstances.
We agree with Williams that an answer to reducing the threat to vulnerable wildlife in the region, and possibly also the wider spread of Ebola, is stopping the illegal trade in wildlife 鈥� dead or alive. This seems a more equitable approach to addressing a culturally divisive issue: the consumption of indigenous wild animals in developing countries.
Using the Ebola epidemic as a Trojan horse for conservation leads to unfortunate associations with that long outdated discourse of conservation which favours wildlife over people.
Ascot, Berkshire, UK
Research wrongs
Richard Smith argues that research misconduct degrades trust in scientists and causes real-world harm (13 September, p 27).
The term “peer review” is generally interpreted as the review of manuscripts for journals. However, an important goal of scientific papers is to give other scientists the opportunity to reproduce the results 鈥� or not.
When there are serious problems, blogs, letters to scientific magazines and the press will make this known. This is also peer review. As far as I know, most, if not all, scientific misconduct is reported and corrected from within its own community, something that rarely happens in other areas. Peer review is a great achievement of the scientific community and should be recognised as such.
The problem is that when a faulty paper is published, such as Andrew Wakefield’s linking of the MMR vaccine to autism, it is promoted by people without any scientific background, who most likely did not even read the paper, never mind the many papers that debunked it.
So who causes most of the “real-world harm”? The self-correcting scientific community, or the scientifically illiterate celebrities and politicians who promote bad research?
Rochester, New York, US
Research wrongs
Smith asserts that universities and other employers of researchers are not very good at gathering and weighing evidence. Since this seems to be a good part of the scientific method, perhaps that is why these institutions so often produce the dodgy papers that he is concerned about.
Spring, Texas, US
National records
Reading Debora MacKenzie’s valuable article examining nation states, two questions struck me immediately concerning my own field, the literate bureaucracies of the Bronze Age (6 September, p 30).
It has long been believed that writing had its origin in the need for bookkeeping in ancient, palace-centred cultures, and the Linear B tablets 鈥� inscribed by Mycenaeans some 3500 years ago 鈥� do show central bureaucracy active right down to recording the names of individual cows in a pasture. Did the government spawn the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy the script, or was it some other way round?
The second question is whether we now tend to project the modern concept of the nation state back upon those ancient polities, depicting them as such on maps and in analysing their history. We seem to do so, and this mirage view of the past appears to add weight to modern conflicts based on supposed entitlement to land, be it in the Levant or across the Aegean.
Saltdean, UK
National records
The mention of Sudetenland in MacKenzie’s article struck me personally since my family comes from this area, and I was born in a part that now falls inside Poland.
The history of relationships between linguistic groups in this region is a striking example of how a political preference for one group over others creates tensions and conflicts. When Hitler invaded, the Czechs and Poles suffered much under the Nazi regime, the German-speaking minority less so. As soon as the Reich fell, German speakers faced recriminations.
In Czechoslovakia, the “Bene艩 decrees” laid the groundwork for the expulsion and punishment of German speakers. Your article states that “the numbers who claimed to be German in the Czech Sudetenland… changed dramatically before and after the war.” That was the result of ethnic cleansing, not a voluntary change of national identity.
Voiron, France
Liquid assets
Naomi Lubick highlights the issue of crumbling water infrastructure and the ideas being developed to handle it (16 August, p 38). As one of the 16 million households in the US that relies on a well and septic system, I take issue with the idea that “nothing gets done” regarding well-water quality.
This assumes that people have to be forced by government to drink clean water. Nonsense. Having moved to a rural area five years ago, water supply became one of our top concerns. When you rely on your own well for water you come to know all aspects of its delivery. Pumping water out of the ground costs money, so we don’t waste it. We get sick if it gets colonised by bacteria. We are more aware of above-ground contamination because we know our aquifers are connected to these sources.
Ask a well owner, and he or she will often be able to tell you their water’s pH, hardness and flow rate, along with well depth and where the septic tank is, what goes into it and what does not. Well and septic owners have more “skin in the game” regarding water quality than their spoiled urban peers.
We don’t need the government taking care of us; we’re doing just fine on our own, thank you.
Dobson, North Carolina, US
Nutrients on a plate
Your article on Jupiter’s moon Europa makes the point that tectonic plate subduction may deliver nutrients from comets and other sources to possible life forms in the ocean beneath the ice (13 September, p 17). Subduction of the ice could, further, deliver oxygen to the Europan ocean.
Ultraviolet light and high-energy radiation striking the ice would create free oxygen, some of which may get drawn beneath the surface. Just as life around ocean hydrothermal vents on Earth is dependent on oxygen dissolved in seawater, so life on Europa would need a source of oxygen.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
First impressions
Anil Ananthaswamy describes some key differences between the responses of babies’ minds and those of adults (23 August, p 40). Yet he seems to take little account of the most profound difference: a newborn baby knows essentially nothing of what is out there, so must interpret almost everything it senses in real time. We adults, on the other hand, have spent a lifetime building an idea of what is out there, and so we are already familiar with everything we experience, and need only attend to the differences between what we expect and what we sense.
The difference between these processes is huge, and might easily explain why babies’ conscious responses are slower.
Even with drugs or love, as Ananthaswamy says, those who already know the world can never again experience what an open-eyed baby does, nor recall it with the same innocence.
Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, UK
Stranger than fiction
How appropriate to have an article about the importance of imagination (20 September, p 32) in the same issue as a report that “droplets” the size of Ireland form in the sun’s atmosphere and fall the equivalent of one-sixth the distance from Earth to the moon (p 38).
People living at the end of the Stone Age were probably amazed to discover that certain rocks could be heated to produce a fiery liquid that flowed like water but which cooled to produce workable materials. Or that melting copper and tin together would produce bronze, harder than either.
As the first article said, we need good imaginations to cope with the strangeness of the world.
Coventry, West Midlands, UK
Quirky crystals
In her article on quasicrystals, Lisa Grossman states that simple tiles with three, four or six sides can tessellate a two-dimensional surface (13 September, p 38).
I wonder if she is familiar with the work of draughtsman and artist M. C. Escher, who made much livelier shapes tessellate, including riders on horseback. Morpeth, Northumberland, UK
At the pointy end
Airlines have many more managerial and technical staff than aircraft. To require at least one of the above staff to be physically present on each flight might be sound safety legislation, especially in the context of pilotless planes (9 August, p 30).
They would thus gain a very sharp incentive to ensure that everything possible is done to deliver a safe flight and landing. And their other work needn’t suffer: with the expected “continuous” internet access, including telepresence meetings, they will just be in a flying office.
Shrewsbury, UK
Hallelujah spaghetti!
I was amused by the letters from Brian Josephson and Eric Kvaalen concerning anti-afterlife dogma (20 September, p 30). Since when does anyone have to disprove every unfounded claim submitted by science fiction fans?
To do so is like proving false the claim that a Flying Spaghetti Monster circles Earth and accepts our prayers every time we pay homage by eating spaghetti and meatballs.
Science examines evidence, as published in established peer-reviewed scientific journals. In the absence of evidence, David Silverman and the rest of us have every right to chuckle.
Indianapolis, Indiana, US
Naming neutrons
Ron Barnes asks what name might be given to a neutron separated from its spin (30 August, p 31). In the US, where odd baseball terms abound, a neutron without spin might be named a “knuckletron”, after the infamous non-spinning pitched ball that curves, dips, wobbles and floats unpredictably.
Downingtown, Pennsylvania, US
Naming neutrons
With regard to naming, how about an “unspun neutron” and a “neutered spin”?
Boulder, Colorado, US
For the record
鈥� Our article on stopped-light lasers pointed readers in the wrong direction (20 September, p 16): the address for Ortwin Hess’s paper is .
鈥� Contrary to our report, the eye-testing smartphone kit developed by Smart Vision Labs does not yet have a fixed price (20 September, p 21).
鈥� We flipped up in our story of the sun’s strange behaviour (20 September, p 38). The star’s magnetic poles switch places every 11 years or so.