Editor's pick: Depression is not just one condition
Clare Wilson reports on disagreements over whether antidepressants work (6 October, p 34). It seems to me that more emphasis should be placed on treating depression as a suite of conditions rather than a single condition with a single treatment.
Some people seem to hold that if a drug doesn't work for everybody, then it is useless and shouldn't be prescribed at all. In fact, whether a drug works is a very individual thing and many people with depression spend the first year trialling different drugs until they find the one that works for them.
This process tends to be entirely horrible – so it is good to know that scientists are now working on tests to predict which drugs will be best for each person.
Wilson also mentions that more women than men are diagnosed with depression or anxiety. I strongly suspect that women are more likely to be misdiagnosed with these conditions when in fact they have other serious illnesses, from chronic fatigue to heart disease.
Don't forget the lunar elephant in the room
Douglas Heaven looks at why we haven't yet detected intelligent life elsewhere (6 October, p 15). The main point, that we haven't yet looked widely enough, is clearly valid.
But Heaven also mentions another point: that Earth may be somehow unusual in its ability to harbour intelligent life. Here's the elephant in the room. Yes, Earth is unusual – it has a moon that is very large in relation to the planet's size.
That is unlikely to have affected the evolution of life, which probably occurred in water. Any life elsewhere that is even vaguely Earth-like would also have evolved in water. But the tides created by our large moon facilitated the movement of life on to land. Without those tides, life, however intelligent, is likely to remain aquatic. Aquatic civilisations would have no use for radio waves, so by searching for radio transmissions SETI is simply looking in the wrong place.
First class post 鈥� 3 November 2018
These man-children shouldn't be in charge of a spitball, much less nuclear weapons
Lucy Burton at those who would renounce nuclear disarmament treaties (27 October, p 3).
You don't have to be literate to be published
Fred Pearce speculates on whether a present-day journal would publish a paper submitted by a janitor with no formal education, like James Croll, discoverer of how ice ages happen (25 August, p 34). Philip Stander, the author of , collaborated with the Ju/'Hoansi people of north-eastern Namibia to study the melding of tranquilliser dart technology with indigenous bows and arrows. This produced a , co-authored by three Ju/'Hoansi. Stander believes this was the first time the publishers permitted illiterate co-authors to be named.
Ownership is not the legal key to data rights
I cringe whenever I read the term “data ownership” (29 September, p 22). Raw data is not protected by copyright or other forms of intellectual property right. Personal data is protected under doctrines of human rights, not property rights.
Instead of referring to some kind of generic “ownership”, it is better to treat the legal issues raised by data collection under the rubric of personal privacy – and more specifically the European Union's recent General Data Protection Regulation. This is where legal and ethical debates over medical information should and must originate.
The mystery of post-surgical pain is its rarity
Surgeon Sohier Elneil describes worrying complications of mesh implants (8 September, p 36). Since 1998, when Bill Macrae and his colleagues published their review, the problems of persistent pain, distress and disability after surgical procedures, known as chronic post-surgical pain (CPSP), have become widely recognised.
There is a incidence of CPSP after most, if not all, surgical interventions. In some cases, such as amputation, this may affect more than 50 per cent of patients and can persist more than 10 years.
In my career as an anaesthetist and pain specialist, I have been left wondering not why CPSP develops but why so many patients' bodies and nervous systems can be subjected to surgery and not develop long-term problems.
We want ferret scat and we want it now
You report that rabbits flee when they smell dead relatives in an extract of ferrets' droppings (20 October, p 18). Please tell me that such a scat extract will soon be made commercially available.
Here in the Yorkshire Dales, gamekeepers blast away at anything in the least bit likely to predate their precious game birds, including protected birds of prey (4 November 2017, p 5). We are also overrun with pesky rabbits.
If we could spray something that could help to reset the balance at least a little towards a natural state of affairs, then that would be a great step forward.
Did I infect this Andean culture with knots?
I was fascinated and somewhat relieved to read of the possibility that the Incas' knotted khipu express a language (29 September, p 33). In Bolivia in 1988, a fellow backpacker taught me the craft of making bracelets from colourful knotted threads, called pulsera.
I had never seen them before, and neither had the Quechua-speaking women I travelled alongside on buses and trains along the Andes. I gave my bag of threads to a young girl from the family I was staying with, in a mud brick and thatch cottage on the island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca. Apparently, locally made pulseras were for sale in the area not long after.
Ever since, I have been concerned that I might have unintentionally triggered this disruption to the making and selling of their traditional loom-woven belts and bags, which carry meaningful designs of their own.
The possible chaotic effect of wind farms
Michael Le Page accepts that wind farms may affect climate – but don't cause global warming (13 October, p 25). Back in 1972, meteorologist Edward Lorenz noted that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in China may alter the course of a hurricane in the Caribbean.
This “butterfly effect” was used to illustrate chaos theory by showing how small changes in initial conditions may lead to large variations in the eventual results. What might be revealed when we start to analyse the wind data from the European Space Agency's ?
Wind farms must remove energy from the system: and that is consequently unavailable to the weather downwind. As a result it may, or may not, rain elsewhere. Surely removing energy from the atmosphere at the rate of many terawatts has a greater effect on it than taking the same amount of energy from the tides has on the Earth-moon system. Have there been any studies on the effects of large wind farms on the weather?
Everything in the future is a quantum wave
Mark Barrett correctly points out that in Richard Feynman's path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, a particle is in a sense everywhere at once (Letters, 13 October). On the same page, Koos Dering says that the interference pattern indicating that the particle has been in two places at once is also evidence that it has not been “seen”'.
Philip Ball writes in his book that superposition isn't really two states at once, but a circumstance in which either state is a possible measurement outcome. There is a ready-made explanation for this if one adopts William Lawrence Bragg's one-line exposition: “Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle.” The path that a particle follows in a double-slit experiment can be determined only in retrospect.
If you're looking for life, best start from here
Kelly Oakes reports that Stephanie Olson wants to rethink how life might influence the make-up of an atmosphere (8 September, p 38). This rethinking started in James Lovelock's 1967 paper in Icarus, ““, which noted that “living systems maintain themselves in a state of relatively low entropy at the expense of their nonliving environments”. Lovelock then declined to work on instruments for the Viking landers, pointing out that the experiments could be done more cheaply from Earth than on Mars.
Has evolution hit on gene drives for itself?
Gene drives can eliminate species, so Simon Terry and Stephanie Howard propose measures to control them (13 October, p 24). Some questions do not seem to have been addressed very publicly.
The relatively straightforward CRISPR technology can achieve a gene drive. So why has the ever-inventive mechanism of evolution never hit on one? Or has it – have any extinctions been due to the accidental arising of a drive? And would a gene drive actually send a species extinct, or would evolution find a way out?
What other species depend on mosquitoes?
Marjorie Meldrum asks about species that rely on mosquitoes as a food source, posing a downside to eradicating them with a gene drive (Letters, 6 October). As far as I know, there are none. Some bats eat them, but don't rely on them.
The editor writes:
• Mosquitoes and their larvae are a significant source of food for many birds and fish. as pollinators.