Editor's pick: Take us from your Leader, Earthlings
快猫短视频 of your Leader entitled “Hello neighbour” (27 August, p 5) arrives at Gnrffff (or as you call it, a “rocky planet orbiting our nearest star”).
I protest the sheer vanity of this. You assume Gnrffff is not inhabited. Here, we use our Improbably Large And Very Expensive Telescope (ILAVET) to monitor all your frequencies. We've been following your primitive progress with interest since you started broadcasting I Love Lucy and alerted us to your presence on what we call “a rocky planet orbiting our nearest star”.
The most troubling aspect of your Leader is this: “If humans or our descendants are still around, we will need somewhere to move to… The discovery of Proxima b might be our first glimpse of an out-of-this-world future.” We are here and intend to stay. Forget about terra nullius and manifest destiny. It won't work with us. We have figured out gravity and time, and have a bloody good understanding of that two-slit experiment that's driving you nuts. We know who really killed Kennedy.
If you send your people, we know you're not sending the best. You'll be sending people who bring drugs. They'll be bringing crime. They'll be rapists. And some, we assume, are good people. Here's our basic plan. We will build a great, great wall around our planet and we will make you pay for that wall.
Don't misunderestimate us.
Talking to the climatically deaf
Although I'm not a gambler, in particularly pertinent situations I am prepared to change my ways. Quentin Macilray asks what we should say to someone who denies climate change (Letters, 27 August). I say, “Put your money where your mouth is!”
I will bet $1000 that the global mean temperature will exceed the record 2015 temperature within the next 10 years. And I will place that bet repeatedly, if I can find an appropriate person to hold my stake for the next decade.
If thousands of us offered this opportunity to the sceptics, would they take us up on it?
Talking to the climatically deaf
It is simply undeniable that the greenhouse effect exists and causes the planet to warm. A calculation as far back as 1937 concluded that doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by 2 °C – a result that still stands.
We may have to wait a few years for an obvious natural indicator… £1,000,000 sea-front properties being demolished by the ocean should make good television.
Talking to the climatically deaf
I suspect that Macilray really knows the answer to his question. There are no simple, unarguable indicators of anthropogenic climate change. Earth's climate is subject to a wide range of influences, and the way they interact makes for a very complex picture.
Similarly to Macilray, I have often had to work hard to get an individual to even consider anthropogenic climate change. Otherwise well-informed people provide tempting counter-arguments, often arising from commercial and broadcast media that are clearly supporting particular business interests. Such people may hear arguments based on considerations they respect – economic ones.
Robert Solow for showing the influence of technological advance on economic growth. Developing new green technologies is a powerful driver of wealth-creation. It is satisfying to make the point that the Chinese certainly seem to have realised this, with a significant move from fossil-based to green technologies.
A final motherhood-and-apple-pie point is that we can leave resources in the ground for future generations to make better use of than we do. As the one-time Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani said: “the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones” and “oil is too precious to burn”.
First class post
Are there concentrations of Alzheimer's disease with hotspots along major routes?
Sarah Hawkes a follow-up to reports of air pollution sending tiny magnetic particles into our brains (10 September, p 10).
Generosity and reciprocity, or not
Bob Holmes presents a rosy view of altruism (13 August, p 26). He does not give sufficient weight to the mores of status and prestige.
The New Guinea highland peoples, for example, generally have no hierarchical chieftain system and could be described as more communist than any Marxist. This does not rule out an ambition to be a “big man”, the first among equals. To achieve this, a young man may prove himself, as a warrior in tribal fights and by displays of wealth made by giving things away. The biggest man is the one who contributes the most pigs and cassowaries to a sing-sing feast.
Wealth is measured by how much you can afford to give away to your wantoks or clan members, and by the same token how much you can realise from them later if the need arises. What may look at first like altruism is here more like putting something in the bank for a rainy day.
Generosity and reciprocity, or not
In 2000 we interviewed 44 people who had come to Australia from northern and southern Italy, mainly in the 1950s, about their experiences of sponsorship, chain migration and settlement help by earlier migrants. Sponsorship often involved considerable generosity, freely given and non-reciprocal. It was based on an expansive sense of solidarity with kinsfolk, friends and paesani from the same small-town community.
Repayment later was neither feasible nor expected (). We did not see evidence of “amoral familism” – the inability to act together for any end beyond the immediate interest of the nuclear family, which has been controversially attributed to southern Italians.
Déjà vu comes back to haunt us
Jessica Hamzelou suggests that déjà vu occurs when our frontal brain regions check memories for discrepancies between what we think we have experienced and what we have experienced (20 August, p 9). How does the brain know what we have actually experienced? Some form of memory, I presume. If that is reliable enough to be a reference, then why isn't it the main – or only – memory of the event?
Déjà vu comes back to haunt us
You suggest that déjà vu is a sign your brain's memory checking system is working well. My experience of déjà vu is during the “auras” that sometimes precede a generalised epileptic seizure.
Before my temporal lobe epilepsy advanced to what it is today, I regularly experienced overwhelming déjà vu, with an incredible sense of peacefulness. But I was unable to contextualise at the time what it was that I was remembering so vividly.
People with epilepsy also commonly experience memory difficulties. Now, at age 51, this is a far greater problem for me than the seizures themselves.
of Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry and colleagues that while up to 97 per cent of the general population experience déjà vu, it can also “be a sign of certain psychoneurological diseases”. They suggest that the type of déjà vu experienced by epileptics might be different to that of healthy people.
Psychology may need more analysis
Kayt Sukel gives a list of 10 major reversals in medical advice (27 August, p 34). This was in a sense reassuring, in that these matters are now being addressed. I was, however, alarmed that all the reversals concerned treatments for physical ailments, and none for psychological conditions. Should doctors treating such conditions now undergo similar analysis?
London, UK
The editor writes:
• We recently discussed the evidence crisis in psychology (16 April, p 38).
Our ancestor in some warm pore
Penny Sarchet writes that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) “was packaged inside a membrane which created a micro-environment for building complex proteins” (20 August, p 26). The problem with this is that bacteria and archaea have very different cell membranes (among other striking differences) and it is not clear that either could have evolved from the other.
In his book The Vital Question – Why Is Life The Way It Is? (reviewed 25 April 2015, p 46) Nick Lane convincingly argues that bacteria and archaea evolved their cell membranes independently, and that LUCA was a set of replicating macromolecules in a pore of an alkaline hydrothermal vent.
At last, a reason for yawning, maybe
Clare Wilson reports that breathing in helps draw waste fluid from our brains down through the glymphatic system (13 August, p 7). It thus seems reasonable that an exaggerated inhalation would have a bigger effect.
Have we finally discovered the true reason for yawning? Might it offer a boost to the waste-extraction system, keeping the brain functioning properly for a little longer?
Naval colours will help us read better
If only designers of leaflets and posters knew what makers of naval signalling flags have long understood – that from a distance white and yellow look identical, as do red and magenta or blue and black (Last Word, 27 August). Why do we still have to struggle to read blue/black or yellow/white?
A herpes cure test case is at flipper
I am intrigued by the conjunction of two items in one edition of 快猫短视频. The first reports a herpes outbreak in turtles on the Great Barrier Reef (9 July, p 7); the second suggests that gene editing could destroy herpes viruses living inside you (9 July, p 14). Could one provide a useful test case for the other?
For the record
• The “” of a ship is a measure of its volume, not its weight (27 August, p 7).
• The European Union's will come into force in all member states on 25 May 2018 (3 September, p 16).
• Put a safety pin on our right sleeve. The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is in the north-east Pacific ocean (For the record, 20 August).