Editor's pick: Forensic science services should be independent and enduring
I have been a forensic scientist for many years and the report by Linda Geddes on forensic sciences in England and Wales was of great interest (28 April, p 22). However, the mild tone of the article understates how very bad the situation is. The reasons are many, but funding is at the heart of them all. No police constabulary faced with the choice of spending its budget on itself or on an outside forensic science organisation will choose the latter if it can avoid doing so.
The method of funding is as important as its scale. When police pay a fee for each case, this encourages them to order forensic examinations selectively – which means selecting evidence. What we need is a payment method that ensures expertise continues to be available into the future for when it is next needed, not just paying for current use. The loss of expertise in examining fibres when, as Geddes reports, a laboratory has closed for lack of orders illustrates the problem. Defendants in criminal trials and civil court litigants suffer from a lack of funding as well; the legal aid authorities cannot pay for all the work that is needed.
We need laboratories in locations that are convenient for their main customers, the police, to access: every examination must be initiated by someone, and in the overwhelming majority of cases that is the police. Forensic scientists should remain free to undertake examinations to provide information and evidence, regardless of who might benefit. Laboratories should be independent of each other but would cooperate with each other.
The provision of forensic science by the , independently of the chief constable, could be a useful model. Government in England and in Scotland have moved in exactly opposite directions in this matter; they cannot both be correct.
The Barrier Reef does face climate catastrophe
As an environmental educator and scuba diver, I have sadly watched the gradual demise of the once-Great Barrier Reef. It seems to me that the notes of optimism in your Leader on the state of the reef are unfortunately misplaced (21 April, p 5).
Warming seas will knock off most of the reef, and ocean acidification has only just started its inevitable impacts. Several climate trends are irreversible in centuries or millennia, even if we stopped carbon pollution now.
The rapid melting of polar ice is one. Instead of recognising this as a serious warning, the stupid and greedy people who are driving climate catastrophe see it as an opportunity to explore for fossil fuels. Australia's egregious government recently to “save the reef” – while fighting to stymie every avenue for decarbonising the economy. It still supports opening the world's biggest coal mine in Queensland, just west of the reef. The loss of the reef is, alas, the least of the worries facing future generations.
First class post – 19 May 2018
Purify seawater until you cannot tell it from fresh water: a #TuringTest for water Kate Adamala a desalination method inspired by mathematician Alan Turing's only paper on chemistry (12 May, p 6)
Wrestling with our consciousness of time (1)
Michael Brooks seeks a new angle on time (21 April, p 28). Is it not possible that the way our consciousness perceives and experiences time gives rise to the illusion of time as a continuous flow? The past consists of events, memories of which exist in the brain, and our consciousness has access to these. The future consists of events of which there are as yet no memories.
Consciousness cannot exist in the past or the future. It must exist in the present, in the moment when data from the senses enters the short-term memory. I know when “now” is: it is when I am conscious.
Wrestling with our consciousness of time (2)
Classical Greek had three words for time: aeon for time as a concept, including eternity; chronos for clock time; and kairos, the opportune moment. Chronos was a measure of change, marked by rhythmical beats: the lunar phases, the sun's cycling around Earth, the seasons, the swinging of a pendulum and, now, atomic transitions. What would happen if we thought in terms of aeon? Time simply is. It is the matrix from which space was born.
Wrestling with our consciousness of time (3)
Brooks states that we can move as we please in space. Is this true? I think we can move only forwards, which is whatever way we are facing, unless we walk backwards, which would be going forwards but facing the wrong way.
We can't move into negative space any more than we can go backwards in time. I'm not sure this idea helps, but still…
Problem posed, problem sorted a few pages later
It cannot be often that 快猫短视频 states a problem in one report and offers a solution a few pages later. You published a lovely article on physicist Marin Alexe finding that tiny dents improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells (28 April, p 9). It quotes another physicist, P. Craig Taylor, as saying that an array of nanoindenters will be difficult and expensive to manufacture. Now materials scientist Ming Dao has produced an array of tiny diamond micro-needles (p 19). These are bendable, but could something similar do the job on the solar panel?
So, two problems are sorted in one issue – provided the researchers read it or this letter.
Don't meetings start late because they'll be bad?
You report research on whether late meetings are less useful (21 April, p 19). The direction of causality could just as easily be reversed. A large proportion of meetings are bad: unnecessary, badly run or both. People are happy to attend good meetings and reluctant to attend bad ones. They are more likely to be tardy when they expect the meeting to be bad.
The editor writes:
n The researchers also ran small experiments that found that how late a meeting is makes significant differences to its effectiveness and to participants' perceived satisfaction ().
More concerns about antidepressants
I share Jim Alexander's concern about recent proclamations that antidepressants really do work and should be used more often (Letters, 7 April). Guidelines from NICE, the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, should be a last resort for those aged under 18. Yet the number of children being prescribed antidepressants is said to be rising. Counselling should be offered as the first option.
In 2003, UK doctors were told to stop prescribing Seroxat to under-18s because of a link with suicidal thoughts – yet this antidepressant is still given to adults.
Discouraging experiment in and out of school (1)
As a science teacher, I must agree with Roger Redman's concerns over the way we try to encourage engineering in schools (Letters, 28 April). The new courses certainly offer little time to do experimentation or project work.
Most skills requirements relate to writing about activities rather than performing them. And when teachers order equipment they must indicate all the risks and cite health and safety documents, a time-consuming process.
Discouraging experiment in and out of school (2)
Not only is education lacking in practical material, as Redman notes, but in the European Union and North America there are ever-increasing restrictions on hobbies. These are based on fears stemming from rare, but heavily reported, incidents of children misusing tools or materials.
In the 60s and early 70s, when I was young, I learned a lot by making model aircraft and boats, mostly of my own design. Now nobody under 18 is allowed to buy many of the materials and tools needed for these hobbies, or for others with learning potential.
If buying things online supplants shops, it may become difficult for young people to buy anything at all.
Worldwide, the situation is not hopeless yet. Many towns in India have shops where anyone can buy almost anything, and nobody is worried about your age.
Would a glacial cycle by another name be as cold?
You report that cave bears “dominated Europe during the last ice age” (31 March, p 10). Does this refer to the glacial period between the Eemian and the Holocene, ? If so, you have to find a new term for the in which there were 30 to 50 glacial-interglacial cycles.
How about promoting the terms “glacial” and “interglacial”? The loose use of terms causes considerable confusion, including a lack of awareness that the Anthropocene started 50,000 years ago in Australia, 12,000 years ago in North America and 700 years ago in New Zealand.
That was in no sense an 'adorable' little dog
I was horrified by the image that you used to illustrate your piece on the workings of a dog's mind (7 April, p 12). The dog pictured is : it has been bred for an exaggeratedly broad, short skull with bulging eyes.
Such dogs may suffer all their lives from serious respiratory difficulties. Many also experience painful eye conditions.
Whose tongue more poisons than this?
Recently I have come across about “military-grade” novichok nerve agents (though not in 快猫短视频). These leave me wondering what other grades there are – domestic grade?
The editor writes:
• We suspect that, beyond adding spice to copy, the term is meant to distinguish “military” from “paramilitary” grade, the presumably inferior product of a non-state actor.