Editor's pick: People must undo local ties before changing
Dan Jones omits a crucial precondition for people to be able to acknowledge fact-based evidence and reverse their beliefs on controversial subjects (3 December 2016, p 28). So much depends on the degree to which a person has to undo commitments made to other people. Someone who privately believes in unrestricted gun ownership but is not a member of a local gun club or the National Rifle Association, for example, may have less difficulty considering gun control than would the head of an NRA chapter. Change in individuals requires change in the groups they belong to.
A community may react to crop failures due to seeds spoiling in warm, moist soils, but resist climate change initiatives in general. Children's deaths in a measles epidemic may increase immunisation rates faster than people being told that reports of vaccine harm were a sham. Unless people's resistance and denial result in severe, local consequences that allow them to change tack without losing face with their neighbours, significant fallacy reversals are unlikely.
Whose job is it to burst the filter bubble?
Sally Adee seems to suggest that responsibility for making sure people are not presented with a biased view of the news and current affairs via the internet rests with the media user (26 November 2016, p 24).
Surely this is not sufficient. Not all readers will see the need to click on any “widen perspective” button that may be provided.
The approaches described suggest to me that no social media or search-engine owners are planning to do anything about the problem. Or not, perhaps, until the first murder cases resulting from their inaction start appearing in the courts. If users are living their lives in biased and conspiracy-believing worlds of make-believe, it cannot be long before we see roaming the streets.
First class post
Could the reason be that most mothers are right-handed and need that hand free?
Jessie M. H. than right-brain specialisation for mothers mostly holding babies on the left (14 January, p 10)
'Criminality' is far from being a physical fact
You report Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang having trained software so that it “correctly identified criminals 90 per cent of the time” (10 December 2016, p 20). But which “criminals”?
Did it pick out lawbreakers such as homosexuals, bankrupts and drinkers of alcohol? Critics of the ruling party? Strike organisers? Adulterers? Apostates?
All these activities are or have been treated as crimes somewhere in the world. Researchers need reminding that criminality is a social construct, and not a biological fact.
Please desist from the insults, doom and gloom
Your Leader articles seem to frequently insult and demean those (indeed the majority) in the UK who voted for Brexit. For most of us, 600 years of evolving parliamentary democracy carries rather more weight than what may be perceived as a failing utopian dream.
We are not about to withdraw from the scientific community in Europe: funding has been declared a government priority and the Confederation of British Industry has announced an expected bonanza in science and technology jobs. So please desist from the insults, and doom and gloom, and concentrate on the science – or some of us may look elsewhere for our enlightenment.
The editor writes:
• We mean no offence to those who backed Brexit, for which there are principled arguments (4 June 2016, p 18). We do not, however, respect those who sought to win by peddling falsehoods. As to the outlook for British science, we have welcomed recent good news, but remain to be convinced this does much for its long-term security (26 November 2016, p 5).
A volcanic impact on the English countryside
David Hoey asks about possible effects of the 1783/84 eruptions in Iceland on English agriculture (Letters, 17/24/31 December 2016).Gilbert White's 1789 book describes atmospheric conditions in the summer of 1783 that match those associated with the 1815 explosion of Tambora in the East Indies.
England saw a rise in wheat prices in 1783, which persisted for the next two years: from this we can infer that harvests were thin. The shows below-average temperatures in 1783 and 1784 (as it does in 1815).
A pair of my forebears died at that time. In their parish there were more burials in the summer than in the years to either side. It is tempting to suppose that air quality was involved.
We should remember, though, that industrialisation was already drawing labour from agriculture, and that the introduction of the “” of poor relief by wage top-up from 1795 had unintentionally adverse effects on rural labourers.
The Honourable Robot for Eatanswill will stand
Zoltan Istvan discusses giving robots the vote when they are as intelligent as the average human (17/24/31 December 2016, p 18). I'm all in favour of this, since they will be completely logical (like me). But what I would really like is a robot to replace politicians.
The results of an innate sense of fairness
I read with interest Michael Norton's comments on earnings differentials (10 December 2016, p 18). They remind me of studies that find a sense of fairness in primates (20 September 2003, p 19). Could this be behind the outrage over chief executives' pay? Often politicians and supporters of high executive salaries dismiss such outrage as “the politics of envy”.
I believe the outrage is more likely to be driven by the sense that in Western economies most executives are white men, and those expressing outrage can never join this elite, regardless of skills or ability.
Many believe the idea of a meritocracy is a lie, since they face “glass ceilings” because of their gender, race or class. Recently, executive salaries have reached levels that are considered obscene. Was this a catalyst for anti-establishment attitudes in the general population?
Our bugs probably do not outnumber us
Daniel Cossins repeats the widely circulated factoid that our bodies contain “perhaps 10 times more” bacterial cells than human cells (10 December 2016, p 31). This has been by the biologists Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo, whose study you mentioned at the beginning of last year (16 January 2016, p 14).
Sender and colleagues write that the myth of a 10:1 bacterial-to-human cell ratio is based on a single “back-of-the-envelope estimate” by the biochemist in his 1972 paper ““.
Finding meteorites in your gutters is easy
You report the “first time” that cosmic dust has been found in urban dirt (17/24/31 December 2016, p 12). Iron micrometeorites are in fact very common and easy to find wherever rain is frequent and guttering to catch it is fitted to buildings.
Iron space dust that is fine enough to escape incineration as “shooting stars” when entering Earth's atmosphere drifts down continuously. To these small iron spheres, scrape several handfuls of mud from a convenient roof gutter, preferably a plastic one, add to a bucket of water and stir.
Fish for meteorites with a strong magnet wrapped in a plastic bag. Remove the magnet, carefully rinse the bag into a glass dish and look for fine, dark grey dust. Dragging the magnet underneath will concentrate the dust. A good magnifier will show tiny spheres, some of them up to 0.2 millimetres in diameter.
Gender effects on sickness seen before
Gian Volpicelli reports that while using an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, 78 per cent of women but only a third of men report motion sickness (17/24/31 December 2016, p 21). The researchers as “anecdotal”. Perhaps they are not aware of a related gender difference in the incidence of post-operative nausea (PON). Anaesthetist found that women were three times more likely to have PON than men.
Other risk factors for PON include a previous history of motion sickness, use of opioid drugs and – to the chagrin of all doctors – being a non-smoker.
As patients tend to lie still while they recover, the suggestion that the difference is due to women having greater body sway seems unlikely. Anaesthetists don't have much of a theory either. As usual, more research is needed.
Monkeys bite their tongues for the quiet life
You ask why monkeys don't talk, given their vocal apparatus (17/24/31 December 2016, p 15).
When I was a child in what was then Rhodesia, I heard people say that monkeys speak perfectly well among themselves but never let humans hear them because then they would be made to work.
For the record
• Brighton is the UK town that had 16 urban foxes per square kilometre in 2013-2015 (7 January, p 6).
• Giving a woman a steroid before 9 weeks of pregnancy can alleviate some of the symptoms of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, such as genital ambiguity (7 January, p 8).
• Periodic error: Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev (Quiz, 17/24/31 December 2016).
• Flippin' 'eck: the north and south poles of Earth's magnetic field swap places every few hundred thousand years (14 July 2012, p 14).