Editor's pick: We should embrace appropriate cooling
Cedric Lynch writes that he would need planning permission to use his heat pump for cooling (Letters, 19 January). Heat pumps are a central part of the UK government's plan, with of 20 million being installed by 2050. Progress has been stalled by the introduction of the scientifically hard to grasp concept of “renewable heat” in response to the EU directive on heating and cooling.
The UK decided that cooling was bad and to be discouraged. A better approach has been demonstrated in the Netherlands over many years: use large heat pumps to cool buildings in summer, store the heat in the ground until winter and then deliver it back to the building.
A few such schemes are appearing in the UK. We have recently completed with the support of . To drive down the cost of heat pumps, we need many more. We need appropriate cooling to be recognised as a benefit. City temperatures are rising. As we struggle to decarbonise heat, let's find ways to solve two problems at once.
Winning the war against antibiotic resistance (1)
Debora MacKenzie notes the problem in the economics of new antibiotics (19 January, p 20). If they are used as sparingly as they should be, not enough of them are sold before patents on them expire for firms to make profits from developing them. I suggest tweaking the current patent system so that the patent remains in force until research costs are paid back, allowing some proportional profit. This could stabilise other medicines, too.
Winning the war against antibiotic resistance (2)
MacKenzie leaves to the end of her report the observation that ideology has frowned on governments messing with markets. Recent history has thrown up numerous examples of the private suppliers of essential services needing to appeal to public funds to bail them out of self-inflicted crises.
An enterprise supposedly founded on the double principle of honouring public service demands and private profit demands can work quite happily during times of plenty. But during crunches, when one principle needs to take precedence over the other, it is inevitably the one related to profit that will prevail.
Bringing the UK rail network back under public ownership and control seems a popular response to its crises. I plead that the same should happen with the manufacture of medicines. As MacKenzie notes, until the 1980s, government agencies produced public-health vaccines. There are enormous difficulties in doing this with transnational corporations, but that shouldn’t stop us.
Winning the war against antibiotic resistance (3)
Before the antibiotic crisis, the Soviet Union put a lot of effort into using phage viruses that attack bacteria to treat diseases. Though under-reported in the West, this has continued, especially in Georgia, where the is a key centre.
The editor writes:
鈥� This old idea is coming back. In 2015, at the University of California, San Diego, used a phage to cure her husband of a life-threatening infection. Now she co-heads a new institute and start-up firms that have treated another five people. In June 2018, they to develop the therapy.
First class post 鈥� 16 February 2019
Is it not a problem that only males were studied 鈥� hardly equates to all teenagers?
Stella Collins of a study that found those who copy each other’s risk-taking have more friends (9 February, p 14)
Surviving tuberculosis by chance 70 years ago
I picked up the piece by I. Glenn Cohen and Alex Pearlman on medicines that record when they have been taken (29 September 2018, p 22) at the doctor’s surgery. I was more than mildly interested in their use to ensure antibiotics for tuberculosis are taken.
In 1949, at 20, I was diagnosed with TB and rushed into the then . Treatment didn’t go much further than warm bed baths. My father was then a London taxi driver and took someone to an address near Wigmore Street, where private doctors were concentrated. He asked a doctor, Lee Lander, what could be done for his dying daughter. Lander said he was running an experimental treatment for TB and offered to visit me in hospital.
The next day, I heard him tell my parents of a new drug called streptomycin and ask them to sign a waiver. I was kept in an isolation room with no exercise, but constant visits by Lander and others coming to examine me.
I stayed in the hospital for three months, then went to Frimley Sanatorium. I was eventually weaned off both medicine and injections and allowed to exercise, but was still given the old treatment of to paralyse my diaphragm. As you can see, I survived.
The cost of jeopardising medicine availability
You report uncertainty over the UK's supply of medicines in the event of a no-deal Brexit (19 January, p 5). A family member has glaucoma and uses prescribed eye drops to control it. Without drops, eye pressure rises and puts pressure on the optic nerve. Permanent blindness can result.
Is the UK Department of Health stocking up on glaucoma drops? Apart from the tragic personal cost of those who would go blind, it would be expensive to take care of the needs of the many people who could lose their sight, and who are now able to work, drive and run their homes without needing other help from the authorities.
Much bigger than your average water tank
Sandrine Ceurstemont writes about “water tanks” in Sri Lanka (12 January, p 46). These are not what people outside the Indian subcontinent usually think of as a tank. An ancient one in Sri Lanka, the Parakrama Samudra, covers 30 square kilometres.
Bureaucracy as a barrier to copyright explosion
Leah Crane suggests that if art generated by machine learning or artificial intelligences is deemed by the courts to be subject to copyright then AIs could flood national copyright offices with applications (5 January, p 18). Any work is protected by copyright from the moment it is created. Providing one can demonstrate provenance, registration isn't necessary. In the event of an explosion of AI copyright claims, national copyright offices could increase charges for registration. It would become uneconomical to register millions of AI works.
The editor writes:
• Registration is necessary for effective copyright protection in the US – without it, claimants must bear their legal costs, win or lose, for example – and there are fees. It is not required for art in any other country and is not possible in, for example, the UK.
Green sky thinking: don't rule out the obvious
Gisborne, New Zealand
Paul Marks mentions suggestions for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by aircraft, ranging from straighter flight paths to electrification (5 January, p 32). But he omits the elephantine obvious: reduce the traffic. A globally agreed carbon tax is essential for climate-change mitigation, along with increased consumer awareness.
If you forswear planes, what do you do instead?
You praise 10,000 Swedes who have forsworn air travel (Leader, 5 January). Whether that is a good thing depends on what they do instead. If they go to the same destination by car, with only one or two people in the vehicle, they may be consuming more fuel than if they had taken a plane.
Feeling a bit flat about electric vehicles
Discussion of cars becoming more autonomous extends to whether they benefit from back-seat drivers (2 February, p 16). But what of the additional electrical power the car needs to use to process this feedback? This load on a vehicle's battery is parasitical on its primary function as a means of transport. Could this be a limiting factor in the uptake of driverless vehicles?
Life may need both a star and a moon to make land
Guy Cox (Letters, 19 January) and Eric Kvaalen (Letters, 15 December 2018) focus on the strength of the moon and the sun in creating tides large enough to allow marine life to make it onto land. But the sun and the moon together cause the range of tides to vary from “spring” to “neap” roughly every 14 days. An organism that came ashore at spring tide – when the range is largest – could have two weeks to get a toehold on land before the succeeding spring tide washed it out to sea again.
It is, of course, more complex. The tidal resonance of a basin or estuary can have a greater effect on tidal range than the moon or sun. Compare the large tides in the English Channel with the small ones in the Mediterranean.
Send for the crows to stone those drones
Chris Stokel-Walker mentions Dutch eagles failing to follow orders to hunt drones (19 January, p 10). Later in the same issue, you again report the intellectual abilities of crows (p 17). It seems that we should try to train crows.
For the record 鈥� 16 February 2019
鈥� Before schoolchildren discovered Ediacaran fossils in the UK, geologist Reg Sprigg found some at Ediacara in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia in 1946. These weren’t initially recognised as Ediacarans as we now understand them (12 January, p 28).
鈥� Not very heavy: the space rock that hit the moon during its eclipse probably had a mass of 2 kilograms (26 January, p 6).
鈥� The missing diagram of the Denisova cave in Siberia can be found at newscienti.st/DenisovaPlan (2 February, p 12).
