Editor's pick: The insular depression of conservatism
So psychedelics dissolve the self, make people kinder, make them bond more with others, bring them closer to nature and make them more politically liberal (19 August, p 42). All follow from the first: once you reduce your individualism, you are just a part of the community and part of the world. It seems plausible that politics follows. Conservatives place higher value on the individual or narrow group and the left on the broader collective.
The interesting question is how that results in a treatment for depression. Could other mechanisms for reducing the power of the “self”, such as Buddhism, treat depression ?
Editor's pick: The insular depression of conservatism
Graham Lawton suggests that conservatives might want to stop experiments on psychedelics to treat depression, considering the possibility that their use makes people more politically liberal. Perhaps he has inadvertently stumbled upon another conclusion: that conservative people are depressed.
Colour blindness and psychedelic drugs
Sam Wong reports that microdosing with magic mushrooms or LSD could help ease depression and has few harmful effects (17 June, p 22). He notes in passing that five men with colour blindness dropped out of the trial “because they were experiencing visual effects”.
Wait. Something remarkable is going on here. Why should having cone cells with fewer than the usual three pigments have such a dramatic effect on a person's response to psychedelic drugs?
Perhaps it is something to do with the disabling effect of living with atypical colour vision in a society designed for trichromats. If so, I would expect the effects to be particularly noticeable when looking at TV and computer screens, colour photographs and paintings, all of which assume trichromatic colour vision. Further investigation might yield insights into how we see colour.
First class post
But people shown images of heavier women drafted heavier versions of beauty
Eliza Windholz of news that seeing photos of skinny women changes your idea of beauty (2 September, p 8)
Being good without god and less so without logic
Bob Holmes describes a poll revealing that most people said a serial killer was more likely to be a teacher who didn't believe in god than a teacher (19 August, p 22). It seems strange that the study combined a test for anti-atheist bias with a logic test: the correct answer was that the murderer was a teacher, because the set of teachers is larger than those of atheist or believer teachers.
The way the experiment was set up, people's prejudice – either for or against atheists – would only come out if they first failed the logic test. It seems less surprising that those who fail a logic test would also have an irrational bias.
Being good without god and less so without logic
Holmes suggests that atheists are under-represented in prisons because they are more moral than believers. It could be simply that atheists are more intelligent, and so they don't get caught.
A bipartisan focus for climate action
Adam Corner, commenting that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Sequel could make rifts over climate policy worse, makes an excellent point: that in order to last, climate solutions will need bipartisan support (12 August, p 22). In the US, conservative legislators, wary of their next electoral challenge, are reluctant to support proposals that originate from the left.
But we are finally starting to see climate action efforts that are bipartisan or conservative in origin, most notably the House , that now has 26 Republicans and 26 Democrats as members and is growing by about four members a month. I encourage any US voter who supports action on climate change to ask their representative to join the caucus.
It would be a sweeter forest by any other name
I am saddened that the rest of the world will have to take measures to counter the destructive actions of Donald Trump. Even so, I am all in favour of the global tree-planting project reported by Olive Heffernan (26 August, p 24). But I must take issue with its name.
I suggest another that does not allow the twisted mind to take any sort of credit. There are far too many Trump-thises and Trump-thats in the world already. Time for a new term: perhaps the Untrumping Forest?
You wouldn't want to swim in blood that way
What swimming stroke should nanorobots employ in blood (29 July, p 8)? You are correct that the crawl is the fastest stroke freely allowed in competition (Letters, 19 August). But it would be inefficient in blood. The crawl is performed on the water's surface. The forward motion of the arms meets only air resistance. Try doing the crawl underwater, or in blood, and the arms' forward movement meets the much stronger resistance of the liquid and acts as a brake.
As Stephen Johnson writes, the streamlined “dolphin kick” is the fastest stroke, especially within a liquid (Letters, 19 August).
Are you the weakest link in an artificial war?
Steve Swift thinks that in a future war, humanity might just be spectators whilst intelligent robots fight, on the basis that “in battle you always destroy the most potent threat first” (Letters, 26 August). Not always.
It is also prudent to attack where your enemy is weaker and can be outflanked. Belgium was not the most potent threat facing Nazi Germany, but because invading Belgium outflanked the French Maginot Line defences, it knocked France out of the war much earlier than anticipated.
An intelligent AI might see the human supporters of an enemy AI as the weakest link in the forces against it and attack that population of humanity.
Does rabies in suburban foxes pose a threat?
Clare Wilson reports how dog vaccination could help eradicate rabies (5 August, p 38). She does not mention foxes – which seem to be increasingly filling urban and suburban niches and, alongside bats, are responsible for many of the instances of animal bites followed by rabies treatment where I live in New England.
How similar is the fox rabies virus to the dog version? I was bitten by a fox carrying a rabies virus not 3 metres from my suburban front door, and luckily had access to rapid treatment. Can other infected canids biting dogs spread fox or coyote rabies?
The editor writes:
• Fox rabies can infect dogs, but although, on average, each dog infects 1.2 others with dog rabies, non-canine strains tend to spread to less than one other dog so the infection quickly fizzles out.
AIs do not yet rule the bad poetry hall of fame
You don't need artificial intelligence to write poetry that can fool experts, even by being “so bad it could be human” (15 July, p 14). In 1944, an Australian journal of avant-garde poetry – to much critical acclaim – works by a fictitious poet called .
The poems were lines cobbled together from a random selection of books, including three lines copied verbatim from a US report on swamp drainage. It could be argued that the scenario was poetry in itself.
What happens to plastic denser than seawater?
We see many pictures of floating plastic litter and littered beaches (for example 17 June, p 8). Several common plastics, including PVC, PET, nylon, polycarbonate and Teflon, are denser than seawater. Has any survey been done of the seabed in litter-prone areas?
The editor writes:
• Small particles of plastic will hang around at the surface. We have reported a suggestion that plastic of all varieties may be sinking to the sea floor as colonising organisms weigh it down (3 June, p 10). Surveys may be necessary to tell us more.
In Arabic the number line runs from left to right
I was very interested by Jessica Hamzelou's report of newborn babies having a sense of a number line (26 August, p 9). Hamzelou notes that “in Western cultures, people tend to think of numbers increasing in value along a mental number line from left to right, while people who speak Arabic or Hebrew picture numbers running in the opposite direction”. Perhaps surprisingly, numbers in Arabic, unlike the text, are written from left to right.
Melting ice cap and the dynamics of Earth
Articles sometimes examine how vegetative greening and blackening are causing the Arctic ice cap to melt faster – involving a massive amount of ice. What effect would its melting have on Earth's rotation and its shape?
The editor writes:
• The axis of rotation is shifting and measurement of the resulting North Pole drift is being used to monitor melting (21 December 2013, p 12). But the movement attributable to climate change is, so far, only of the order of a metre.
Those ultimate nameless things that deeply sleep
Geraint Lewis mentions the idea that aliens may be out there but hibernating (5 August, p 24). They would thus be sleeping through the aeons until the “stars are right”. To anyone who has read the works of H. P. Lovecraft, with their countless nameless horrors sleeping in the and elsewhere, this sounds worryingly familiar.