Editor's pick: The energy cost of a shared shower
The corollary to the question headlining your leader article “What price the climate?” (17 October, p 5) is “What price on carbon?”. The increases imposed on the price of crude oil by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) since 1973 show how global consumption can change. The price of crude oil went from $3 per barrel to $40 by 1981. Consumer prices for fuels increased about 25-fold. Global consumption swiftly declined.
Decreased consumption, driven by the price hike, was brought about by measures ranging from insulating houses to improved fuel efficiency. One popular idea was to shower with a friend.
Many countries have applied carbon pricing at rates of a few percentage points of the consumer cost and the result is very little, if any, reduction in fuel consumption. For governments, imposing carbon price rises akin to the OPEC experience is unthinkable.
However, reductions in fossil fuel use ultimately depend on using the fuel more efficiently or replacing it with green technology. This approach is the basis of the proposed Paris agreement and it is to be hoped that it is adopted and implemented aggressively by all countries.
Brampton, Ontario, Canada
Remedies for soil degradation
Joshua Howgego describes high-tech remedies for soil degradation (10 October, p 42). He doesn’t mention, however, the practices of Conservation Agriculture, which are already used on around 155 million hectares worldwide (regrettably few of them in the UK).
has three basic principles: to minimise soil disturbance by tillage; to maintain continuous soil cover by plant mulches and cover crops; and to rotate crops of different plant genera (preferably including deep-rooting, nitrogen-fixing legumes). More information can be found at .
These measures increase and sustain the soil’s organic matter, biota and fertility. They enhance the soil’s capacity to absorb rainfall and store moisture, sequester carbon and reduce fuel use in tilling. They need to be promoted more extensively not only to enhance and sustain crop yields, but also to reduce the risks from floods, drought and water pollution. There is scope for more research to tailor Conservation Agriculture to soil, climatic, economic and socio-cultural environments and to measure the benefits, including carbon capture.
London, UK
<b>First class post</b>
With the amount of our data the government has lost or left on trains, this is insane
Nigel Vickers on the UK government’s plans to access browsing history and other “metadata” (newscientist.com/article/dn28447)
Shared language is no panacea
When will we discard the myth that shared language is a recipe for peace and cooperation (31 October, p 5)? Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland speak the same language. So do Serbs, Croats and Bosnians, and likewise Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutus. The ancient Greeks all spoke mutually intelligible dialects, which didn’t prevent the Athenians killing the men and enslaving the women and children of the island of Melos.
Sharing a language, as often as not, just helps you understand the vicious things the other lot say.
Totescore, Isle of Skye, UK
There is more than one other way
I agree with reviewer Graham Lawton that Matt Ridley is wrong to have didactic beliefs, such as that the market would have come up with a better solution than the National Health Service (24 October, p 42). But Lawton’s arguments are also one-sided.
In the rest of Europe, the market dictates health services while the state ensures everyone is covered by insurance. The result, in economies doing as well as the UK, is a better system than the NHS, cheaper, more caring (including time spent with doctors who are not overworked) and with choice. Please stop being so parochial.
London, UK
A universe with no special scale
There may be explanations for the observations of giant cosmic cold spots that Colin Stuart reports that are simpler than intruding multiverses (24 October, p 30). We can rewrite the cosmological principle based on the evidence presented.
First, let’s assume the universe has structures of any size. The cosmological principle still applies, in that we are in a non-special place, because every point in the greater universe is special. The uniqueness of our position is simply analogous to the “goldilocks zone for planet Earth”, but it now applies to the particular region of the universe that we are able to inhabit.
In other words, we are in an expanding zone of the right density, that allowed us to emerge and observe our universe after a few billion years of evolution.
To me this feels much more grounded than intruding universes, or than Lawrence Krauss’s conclusion in A Universe from Nothing (reviewed 14 January 2012, p 46) that we are in a special place at the only time we can observe the universe and deduce the standard model, since in billions of years we will be alone in our galaxy.
Federal Way, Washington, US
Do single-celled organisms do sex?
Is it right to say that prokaryotic organisms don’t have sex (19 September, p 28)? They can exchange genetic material via virus-like particles.
Why not call this “sex”?
Barmouth, Gwynedd, UK
Do single-celled organisms do sex?
Single-celled organisms don’t need sex. They exchange DNA segments. They can even select particularly useful bits to exchange. Only multicellular organisms are stuck with original DNA when cloning; that, or waiting for some virus or fungus to screw with their DNA.
Ithaca, New York, US
Do single-celled organisms do sex?
鈥� Some scientists do describe prokaryotes as having sex. This is different, however, from sex involving the fusion of two gametes, each with half as many chromosomes as the adult. This allows genetic recombination across the entire genome.
Bored, bored and maybe depressed
Your article on boredom mentions a well-known saying that I recall, slightly differently to the author, as “there’s no such thing as bored, only boring people” (29 August, p 36). This may be a parent’s exhortation to a child meaning “the answer is up to you, no point complaining”. But all the author’s explanations for feeling bored 鈥� an evolutionary “kick up the backside”, dopamine depletion, personality trait, overstimulation, failure of the attention system 鈥� suggest it is far from being a personal choice.
When I have been bored, I have often also felt depressed and unable to see the enormous variety of interesting things and creative opportunities around me. I was struck by how many of the symptoms of boredom were also consistent with depression.
Psychological variables such as autonomy versus dependence or internal versus external “locus of control” may be more predictive of both conditions. Being slightly bored or depressed are useful signals of the need to change our behaviour, as Caroline Williams notes, but as I see it we only get stuck in them when we don’t listen to the signal.
Darlington, Western Australia
A new solution to save free will
Nathaniel Hellerstein and Anthony Castaldo (Letters, 10 October) both point to an alternative “solution” to the free will issue. Yet the laws of physics are a red herring.
While the common conception is that all of biology is chemistry and all of chemistry is physics, this is incorrect, because “below” physics and “above” mathematics sits the science of information. Consciousness and free will aren’t based on physics: they are information phenomena. None of these things emerge from chemistry and physics: they emerge from the even more fundamental information “layer”.
So as Hellerstein suggests, free will and consciousness could be the results of self-causation, the “strange loops” that cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter describes, which emerge directly from information. To reconcile free will with our scientific knowledge, we just need to ignore physics and go with information.
Lincoln, New Zealand
Key-ring orbits not corkscrew planets
You report the idea of a planet corkscrewing back and forth between two stars, from a (19 September, p 38). This is thrilling, all the more so for a science fiction author like me. Unfortunately, I read the paper differently.
As soon as Oks allows for the fact that the two stars are not motionless, planetary orbits around the axis between them can only be stable when their plane crosses that axis very close to one or other star 鈥� at not much more than 1 per cent of the distance between them. That would make the orbit more of a key ring than a corkscrew.
Worse, it seems to me that the conservation of angular momentum means the planet’s orbital plane must stay aligned in a constant direction 鈥� it may start out orbiting the axis, but once the stars turn in their own orbit by any significant amount this would no longer be the case.
Perth, Western Australia
Canada's flag is a maple leaf
I was startled to read that Fred Pearce suspects “sugar maples, yellow birch, red spruce and others are likely to shift north into Canada” (3 October, p 42). Too late! They are already here.
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� Joseph Bramante, who suggested that dark matter could supply mass for supernova explosions, is at Notre Dame University in Indiana (31 October, p 14).
鈥� There’s more to life than that: we meant to say that graphite flecks in 4.1-billion-year-old zircon crystals had a ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotopes that is characteristic of organic origins (24 October, p 12).
鈥� Vincent van Gogh said in letters that he used chrome yellow pigment in all seven of his Sunflowers series of paintings (31 October, p 17).