Editor's pick: Love is the key ingredient for happy families
You assert that more than half the children in the UK and the US are being brought up outside a nuclear family (2 December, p 5). This is wrong, at least for the UK. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics , 78 per cent contain two parents of opposite genders, either married or cohabiting.
So the traditional nuclear family is still the dominant one. However, many children experience more than one kind of family during their childhood. Even I, now 70 years old, lived in an extended family with my single mother, and then in a traditional household when she remarried.
Cross-sectional studies are valueless in exploring the effect of family type on children's happiness. Longitudinal studies would allow us to explore the trajectories of children through multiple household types.
My experience is that what matters is that parents, alone or together, gay or straight, love their children and let their children know it.
Animal rights need not be subject to caveat
The reason MPs voted not to enshrine the Lisbon treaty into UK law was that the treaty is flawed and ineffective in preventing cruelty to animals (2 December, p 25).
After the fine words about animals being sentient beings, the treaty promises to respect “the legislative or administrative provisions of the member states, relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage”.
This caveat means that if member states have a traditional activity involving cruelty to animals they can continue doing it. This includes torturing bulls to death in the bullring for public entertainment, confining veal calves in narrow crates so that they can hardly move, force-feeding geese through metal tubes pushed down their throats to produce foie gras, treating donkeys as if they were unfeeling machines, negligent cruelty to live animals being shipped for slaughter and so forth.
These activities would already be illegal in this country under current UK law.
First class post
“We do just fine with monogamy. It's so successful we repeat it 3 to 5 times per lifetime” kay646464 delivers her verdict on our feature exploring modern families (2 December, p 30)
An unusual benefit of immunosuppressants
The possible use of stem cell therapy for treatment of Parkinson's disease is long awaited and much needed (2 December, p 8). However, I note that in the clinical trials, an immunosuppressing drug is to be used as well, as the cells are not matched to the recipient.
Previously, 快猫短视频 reported evidence that Parkinson's progression is driven by an autoimmune response attacking dopamine-producing cells (24 June, p 11).
In my experience, immunosuppression therapy has been of great benefit in reducing symptoms of Parkinson's disease, though I take this medication for sarcoidosis.
A chiller for wine keeps fruit just fine
Sam Wong raises the problem of a fridge being too cold for storing tomatoes, yet the kitchen being too warm (9 December, p 25).
I solved this by buying a wine cooler. I seldom drink wine, but it stores my tomatoes and bananas very nicely. They used to rot or get overripe, and at 12°C they seem fine. Is there a market for a fruit and vegetable cool box?
When Earth sneezes, the cosmos catches a cold
I am alarmed by Claudius Gros's suggestion that we should deliberately seed life throughout the cosmos (18 November, p 10).
Space agencies quite rightly try to sterilise spacecraft sent to planets or moons that might harbour life, however remote the possibility, in order to avoid contamination. Gros's plan is in direct contradiction to this.
We still need much more investigation to verify whether any of the bodies in our solar system contain life or not, so it is unrealistic for us to think we can show that any planet in another star system is truly sterile. Without such proof, it should be considered unethical to risk wiping out alien life forms with Earth-despatched panspermia. I hope this idea will fail to become reality.
Bitcoin is too valuable to spend on stuff
Bitcoin may be a success at many things, but surely it must be a failure as a currency (2 December, p 36). If there can only ever be 21 million bitcoins, then the supply is obviously highly restricted, and the currency will be in a permanent state of deflation.
Your bitcoins will almost certainly have more buying power tomorrow than they do today. If that is so they are a great investment, but why would you ever use them to buy stuff?
Today, the economy relies on more currency continuously entering the system to support an increasing amount of trade and wealth and relies on inflation, hopefully at a controllable low level, to discourage hoarding and promote investment and spending.
Don't paint a smiley face on the grim reaper
Your interview with mortician Caitlin Doughty was unnerving, but also gave much food for thought (11 November, p 40). If we Westerners were to change our attitudes towards death and become a lot more positive in dealing with it, I feel it would take away our healthy discomfort.
We need to fear death, and more so in this century where there is a very big movement in science towards a future that is free of disease and the effects of old age, and therefore of most death.
What does Doughty think of cryonics, which promises to preserve your dead body until you can be revived by future technology? She may well prefer having her dead body consumed by ravenous vultures, but to me nothing deserves more celebration than the prolonging of life and teaching our children that one day everyone may live a very long, very happy life. Because isn't that what matters in the end?
Finding the universe's missing matter
Gilead Amit writes that if dark matter is continuously decaying into dark energy, it would explain the otherwise unexplained rate of the universe's expansion (9 December, p 28).
We now know that gravity and light travel at the same speed. Also that at a critical mass, light is unable to escape and a black hole is formed. Could there be another, greater critical mass where gravity also could not escape?
If so, the effective mass of the universe would reduce over time, presumably giving a similar effect. This would also account for the structure of halo galaxies.
Perhaps indoor solar is not such a bright idea
You say a 5-centimetre-square solar panel being developed “can't quite extract enough energy from indoor light to charge a phone in a reasonable time frame” (18 November, p 16).
Let's suppose the room in question is lit by a 100 watt incandescent bulb with an efficiency of about 2.2 per cent, generating about 2.2 watts in the form of light. That bulb illuminates every surface of a small room 3 metres cubed, for a surface area of 54 square metres or 540,000 square centimetres.
A solar panel occupying 25 square centimetres of this room will claim about 0.0001 watts. Even if the solar panel is 100 per cent efficient, it seems to me that “can't quite extract enough energy from indoor light to charge a phone in a reasonable time frame” must qualify as the understatement of the year.
With engine emissions, size doesn't matter
Governments of all persuasions have always taxed road vehicles unfairly, with varying amounts of tax on both fuel and the annual vehicle tax (2 December, p 24). In more recent years, concern about climate change has led to still more muddled thinking.
For example, larger engine vehicles naturally pay more in fuel tax as they use more fuel. However, if you run a vehicle with a larger engine, but with a low mileage per year, the car tax remains the same. Clearly, if you burn the same amount of fuel in a year as a car with a smaller engine, then the total emissions are the same. So why is the vehicle tax double or more?
The government should practise what it preaches
You write about the steep price we face for failing to tackle climate change (4 November, p 24). One reason for our apathy is that, in the UK at least, the government uses climate change as an excuse to tax the public and restrict their freedoms while using “carbon neutral” wood-burning at Drax power station to fudge its own figures on renewables. People are unlikely to become enthusiastic about climate-change mitigation unless those in power are seen to be taking it seriously.
Flat-Earthers driven around the bend
Elsa Beckett asks whether a group of flat-Earthers has ever mounted an expedition to find the edge of the planet (9 December, p 52). Perhaps they have sent one and are still looking for it.
For the record
• Our article on lizard reproduction left egg on our faces: Kathryn Elmer is at the University of Glasgow (9 December, p 11).
• We meant to say it was the European Economic Community that gave Botswana privileged access to beef markets in 1966 (9 December, p 32).