No to nightingale pie
I was saddened to hear about the plight of migrating songbirds decimated by poaching (14 February, p 48). Are the activists who tackle the poachers also picketing restaurant owners who serve these birds as delicacies? Are they shaming the patrons who eat the little birds?
Such actions might prove more fruitful than going after the hunters. The restaurants are probably located in urban centres and thus easily exposed to the glare of publicity.
Ottawa, Canada
For the record
鈥� The Dutch city of Nijmegen may one day be a coastal city 鈥� as it was described in our article on climate-proofing Europe (7 March, p 10) 鈥� but it is currently about 100 km from the sea.
Name games
Given your Feedback discussion of nominative determinism (28 February, p 56) it was nice to see, on the preceding Letters pages, Mary Voice speaking out, Paul Coyne discussing financial efficiency, and Jon Wise asking intelligent questions.
Coolamon, New South Wales, Australia
I, Carbot
The points raised by earlier correspondents about driverless vehicles are salient (28 February, p 54). I can add another: when there are choices to be made, for example if traffic lights fail, sensible drivers usually rely on eye contact. How will that work with a driverless car?
Surely the interactions of the cars with humans will raise the same problems expected with intelligent robots? I can’t help thinking that the proponents of driverless vehicles haven’t thought through the implications thoroughly enough, and had better go and think it out again. Isaac Asimov might be a good place to start.
Blaenffos, Pembrokeshire, UK
Dead zone revisited
Fred Pearce writes that the world’s largest conservation fence is being constructed around Mount Kenya (28 February, p 16).
In 1955, I was a 17-year-old Kenya Police Reserve tracker team leader in the Mount Kenya Crown Forest. My patrols entered the forest by crossing “the dead zone”, a mile-wide cleared area stretching around Mount Kenya during the Emergency.
This was designed to hamper the ability of Mau Mau groups to obtain food from sympathetic or cowed villagers settled along the slopes of the mountain.
My forest activity was designed to keep the Mau Mau moving, making it impossible for them to obtain sufficient food within the forest itself, and force them to cross the dead zone where they could be spotted and attacked.
The mountain was a through-way for big game, especially elephant and rhino, to cross from feeding grounds on opposite sides of the Crown Forest. Reading Pearce’s article, I wonder what effect the immense strip of cleared land must have had on the mountain’s wildlife?
Burwash, East Sussex, UK
A touch undervalued
Both as a psychologist and a mother, I have witnessed the importance of touch for babies. Often touch is life-giving for sick children. But at the same time, parents are taught to make babies sleep and play alone; babies are deemed “good” once they have learned this and cease to cry when left on their own.
In the West, babies are put in separate rooms, and taken around in prams that do not let them even see or hear their parent. Yet people do not wonder why babies cry when left alone and stop when picked up. Surely it is because babies know what they need.
Mount Waverley, Victoria, Australia
A touch undervalued
This question came up, but didn’t make it into the feature. If we include anorexia as a kind of body dysmorphia, then at least one researcher definitely thinks touch plays an early role in these disorders.
A touch undervalued
In her article on touch, Linda Geddes reported research showing that people who have had a stroke can “recover a lost sense of limb ownership if the arm or leg is stroked on a regular basis” (28 February, p 34).
This led me to think of body integrity identity disorder, a condition in which people feel uncomfortable with or reject one of their own limbs and may wish to have it amputated. I wondered if regular stroking of the limb in question would help these people to accept it as their own?
Cardiff, UK
Anodising delay
I read with interest Hal Hodson’s article on the use of aluminium as a steel replacement (28 February, p 22). I have been producing control software for metal finishing production lines for over 20 years, and foresee a bottleneck that will hamper the increased use of aluminium.
Steel parts are commonly electropainted to increase corrosion resistance and to provide a key for further finishing. Aluminium parts are anodised for the same purpose. The problem comes in the time difference between the processes. Electropainting takes 2 to 4 minutes, while anodising takes 20 to 40 minutes. To get the same throughput in parts processed, production lines will have to be much bigger, and that will require major investment.
Southampton, UK
Elements of a crisis
I look forward to receiving each issue of 快猫短视频, but I was especially impressed by the articles, the tables and the tremendous amount of research that went into Andy Ridgway’s report on the state of the world’s supply of critical elements (14 February, p 35).
You ran an earlier article on this subject in 2007, and were kind enough then to publish a letter from me (23 June 2007, p 23) in which I mentioned some historical examples, such as the near-sinking into incandescent bulb filaments of the world’s osmium production (only about 2 kilograms per year in 1900), and how a crisis was averted by switching to tantalum and then tungsten filaments.
Now, as you bring out, we are ransacking the entire periodic table for rare-earth phosphors etc, and there are fewer and fewer substitutes for these. Ridgway’s article deserves the widest publicity, for while we talk a lot about other depletions threatened by our ever more technology-hungry world, neither the public nor our lawmakers know enough about the great rare element crisis which now faces us.
New York City, US
Beating migraine
We advise readers to discuss any migraine treatments with their registered physician.
Beating migraine
As a long-standing migraine sufferer, I was very interested in Helen Phillips’s article, but she did not mention a cure that works for me and others.
I had been suffering from what she labels a silent migraine. Once a week or so I would experience a blind spot followed by wiggly flashing lines in my vision, which disappeared within an hour, and with no apparent after-effects. My daughter’s circle of friends recommended taking magnesium tablets. Since taking them once or twice a week, I have had no further migraines. I hope this idea might help a few others.
St Nicholas at Wade, Kent, UK
Beating migraine
There is indeed a cure for migraine that works for some, especially those warned of onset by the aura (7 March, p 38).
After a few years of migraine agony in my teens, I found a Reader’s Digest article which advised that as soon as you experience the aura, you should lie down and relax every muscle from toe to head. It worked for me. No more migraines for five years 鈥� until I mistook an aura for sun glare and ended up in hospital. I have since remained migraine-free for 55 years.
Many migraine sufferers I have spoken to have dismissed the method without trying it. Others are cured for life. What is the science here?
London, UK
Getting a head start
The researchers are looking at PEG with two other chemicals, but it’s only one of many hurdles to overcome in this procedure.
Getting a head start
The possibility of transplanting a head and joining the spinal cord by simply flushing the joint area with polyethylene glycol (PEG) appears simply astounding (28 February, p 10).
Repairing nerve damage after traumatic injury is extremely important for full recovery but often not successful. Presumably, the polymer provides a suitable scaffold and environment to grow and join axons.
In light of the importance of the fatty myelin sheath protecting axons (21 February, p 30), I wonder if another group of compounds, the polyethers, might work better than PEG because they are more hydrophobic.
PEG is completely water soluble. Polypropylene glycol (PPG), a polyether, is insoluble in water but can be made soluble by terminating molecular chains with ionic groups. PEG and PPG can be combined with copolymers that act as dispersing and wetting agents. Many other variations exist and I wonder if anyone has considered or experimented with these materials for nerve repair.
Drysdale, Victoria, UK
Labelling the exits
Let me thank Clare Wilson for the professional and unbiased report of the assisted suicide situation in America. However, I felt some of the comments from Diane Coleman, who opposes the practice, were potentially misleading.
Coleman voices concern that because some people waited longer than six months before taking the life-ending drugs they had procured, the process was being offered to patients who were not terminally ill. But the requirement that these people would die “within six months” is an artefact of the limitations of trying to define “terminally ill”.
Coleman also cites that patients may feel “a duty to die rather than a choice to die”. This interpretation of burden on family is common among opponents of assisted suicide reform, and assumes an authoritarian world where doctors tell and patients do; where patients have many duties and no choice.
The euthanasia debate is controversial because most modern people have an entirely different, “patients’ rights” world view, where patients tell and doctors do. In this world, voluntary euthanasia is just another service they expect any modern healthcare system to be able to provide.
Kingston, Tasmania, Australia
Labelling the exits
In writing about the rise of right-to-die legislation in the US, Clare Wilson uses the term “assisted suicide” (28 February, p 13).
Philosophically, it might at first blush be tempting to think of a person who self-ingests a prescription of life-ending medication as committing suicide, but it is no more a suicide than if a person jumps from a high floor of a burning skyscraper rather than be consumed by flames. The question for these people isn’t whether they will die, but whether they can choose the conditions of their own death.
The states that protect this process distinguish it legally from assisted suicide, which may still be illegal. In the case of terminally ill patients who are able to end their life, the coroner may list the terminal illness, not suicide, as the cause of death. And insurance companies do not consider these deaths as suicides when deciding whether to pay out benefits under an insurance policy.
Psychologically and medically, calling the process suicide hurts patients and their families and does not reflect best medical practice. Major organisations in the fields of psychology and medicine support this view.
“Assisted suicide” is thus inaccurate and inappropriate. Better terms include patient-directed dying, physician-assisted dying, or “physician aid in dying”.
Seattle, Washington, US