Editor's pick: For mammals, matriarchy is second nature
Chelsea Whyte reports that in only seven species of mammal do females exhibit leadership (29 September, p 8).
Leadership is a difficult concept to apply to animals, and indeed different definitions seem to be applied in each of the seven species cited. I cannot offhand think of any species of large long-lived social mammal in which females don't exert leadership in at least one of the definitions used here.
From my own observation, I can say that sheep and goats follow senior females' decisions in foraging, as do African guenon monkeys, such as blue monkey females, which also defend territories. Males have other priorities, often spending time living in all-male bands with their own rules. Could the authors name seven mammal species in which males provide leadership?
The editor writes:
• The authors found leadership in 76 species, seven of which had systematic female leadership. Of course, females of the remaining species may take the lead at specific times and in specific situations.
Weighing the evidence on healthy fatness
Claire Wilson explains that as many as a third of people who are overweight have good scores for blood glucose, cholesterol and blood pressure (29 September, p 20). But why is this?
Many factors apart from body fat affect these scores. Another, underappreciated factor is that not all fat is equal.
The main component of stored fat, triglyceride, is not a problem (other than for weight-bearing joints) so long as it is tucked safely away in lipid droplets in small, subcutaneous fat cells. It is not the direct link between obesity and metabolic disease.
The problem comes when triglycerides are stored in large fat cells called adipocytes around the gut in adipose tissue, or even worse in non-adipose tissues, notably skeletal muscle and liver. Here triglyceride produces metabolites that cause resistance to insulin, a feature of type 2 diabetes and other features of “metabolic syndrome”, such as high blood pressure and low-HDL (good) cholesterol.
This helps explain why the glitazone drugs, which shift fat from large visceral to small subcutaneous fat cells, can increase total body fat but improve insulin sensitivity.
Those rare individuals who are unable to make adipose tissue and direct their fat to muscle and liver are insulin resistant and often have symptoms of metabolic syndrome.
Exercise is more beneficial than you might expect from its effect on body fat content, because it burns off troublesome metabolites.
None of this means that losing fat has no benefit in an overweight individual. If other factors remain unchanged, it does.
First class post 鈥� 20 October 2018
I feel safer with the pilot having the same outcome as me!
@wotsapnin isn’t quite ready for the driverless aircraft of the future (6 October, p 42).
Things we believe about economics and the world (1)
Economics is “not an exact science, after all”, says Pascal Boyer (22 September, p 40). Economics is not a science at all. Where's the largely agreed body of prior knowledge? Where are the experiments capable of falsifying?
Where – crucially – are the advances made by disproving previous theories? How come the same prescription produces different outcomes?
Unfortunately, the current discipline is the best we have, but please, let's not forget its woeful inadequacy, and let's also not undermine science by applying the term where it doesn't belong.
Things we believe about economics and the world (2)
Pascal Boyer makes assertions that he is entitled to make in the field of psychology, but he makes claims in the field of economics that he is certainly not.
If you had asked a psychologist to write an article in which he discussed astronomy, and in that article he asserted that no planet has a retrograde motion, you would have been committing the same error.
The first of his “seven flawed ideas” – the notion that wealth is a fixed-size pie – certainly holds in sub-Saharan Africa.
His assertion that prices cannot be controlled by government regulation is wrong in the field of healthcare. All advanced countries have government controls on spending in healthcare, from Japan's free market with price controls, to the UK with its relatively socialised medicine.
The only country that doesn't attempt to control prices in healthcare is the US, where health costs are vastly higher than in any other advanced country and outcomes are relatively poor.
I am sure Boyer is correct in his psychological analysis, but he should be careful about his economic assertions.
Keeping time on the national grid
I am not sure why Steve Swift is having trouble with his electricity tariff timings ( Letters, 29 September). He says his meter takes its timing from the mains frequency; I understood that most Economy 7 meters switch tariffs as a result of a signal broadcast on BBC Radio 4 longwave.
I remember working with the UK National Grid in its London control centre in the 1980s. An important control it had was to compare, during the day, the time shown on a mains electric clock – “electric time” – with the time shown on an independent master clock, “clock time”.
A task of the control engineer was to adjust system frequency so that sometime around midnight, the clocks agreed. I assume that an equivalent system operates today.
Sword-makers were ahead of their time
I read your article about biological materials inspiring attempts to produce metals incorporating layers, or gradients in their composition or structure, in order to combine hardness and toughness (29 September, p 40).
Surely there is a long history of layering steel or iron to make weapons such as swords – with a hard, high-carbon edge, but a tougher, less brittle, lower-carbon core. Similarly, “case hardening” weapons and armour, using techniques to infuse steel surfaces with extra carbon, or with nitrogen to create surface nitride layers, also has a long history.
Are milk alternatives really the white stuff?
Thank you for Chelsea Whyte's article on milk alternatives (22 September, p 22). It is high time that the question about the ecological and health impact of “alt-milks” is addressed in more detail – please write more!
The perceived benefits and harms of these “milks” have been left to marketing and the fashions of conscience. As a consumer and fan of soy and oat milks (the latter comfortingly similar in flavour to Coffee-Mate), I still wonder often at the sense of consuming milk of any kind at all.
Alt-milks typically have complex and highly robust packaging that is neither compostable nor recyclable, and far bulkier than that used for milk, especially as alt-milks seem to come only in 1 litre packs.
Is it time for alt-milk producers to shorten their supply chains, package more renewably, and tell us more about what happens to all the bits of nut, bean, grain that don't end up in their products?
Put Martian tourists on the no-fly list
As a biologist and a space science enthusiast, I strongly object to Robert Zubrin's push for immediate human exploration of Mars (8 September, p 22).
As humanity is witnessing on almost a daily basis, robotics and machine intelligence are opening vast swathes of knowledge and new fields of space enquiry.
The huge amount of money spent on human space exploration has produced little cutting-edge science. One can only wonder what great science has been lost, or greatly delayed, due to funds channelled there instead of robotics and machine intelligence.
Those who count and those who are counted
You say that you surveyed a “representative sample of 2026 UK adults” to report on the public understanding of science and technology (22 September, p 6). But then you say “all interviews were conducted online”. So, did you just guess the views of those who are not?
The editor writes:
• Our survey was designed by Sapio, a market research company in London that employs accepted industry methodologies to obtain a nationally representative sample. According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, 90 per cent of UK adults are “recent internet users” so any error margins associated with offline people not being online will be negligible.
Pouring cold water on green energy efforts
Enid Smith reports that her self-sufficiency is thwarted because she can't find a washing machine that doesn't use a cold water fill, which is heated with expensive electricity (Letters, 8 September). She should try using cold water washing detergent — we've been using it for years!
The alien life hiding in plain sight
Cixin Liu postulates that highly civilised aliens would be as incomprehensible to us as we are to ants (8 September, p 42). Could this be the solution to Fermi's paradox, “Where is everyone?” Answer: they're already here.
For the record 鈥� 20 October 2018
鈥� The data artist with whom Hannah Redler-Hawes co-curated the []LMAO exhibition is Julie Freeman (29 September, p 44).
鈥� Estimates of the number killed by Allied bombing raids on Germany in 1939-45 are in the hundreds of thousands (6 October, p 16).