Editor's pick: The 'last mile revolution' was closer than you think (1)
Chris Stokel-Walker says that one company could be a single point of contact for delivery of online shopping, removing duplication of vehicles (7 September, p 42). Older readers in the UK may remember a similar service provided by the Royal Mail.
Unfortunately, legislation may now be required to reduce the half a dozen delivery vehicles coming down my road every day to just one.
Editor's pick: The 'last mile revolution' was closer than you think (2)
Stokel-Walker explains how online suppliers are looking to use technology to lower the cost of delivery to individual homes and reduce polluting van journeys.
Why not use the existing home delivery service for milk? My milk supplier delivers to our house every other day using environmentally friendly electric vehicles along optimised routes.
Any returns could be handled by leaving them on the doorstep to be collected along with empty milk bottles. As our milk is delivered before I leave for work, packages could be moved safely indoors before I leave.
The growth of the internet was accelerated by the ability to deliver digital packages to the home using the existing landline network. Perhaps the beneficiaries of that online revolution could use existing infrastructure once again.
What have the Roslings ever done for us, then? (1)
I’m all for a fact-based viewpoint, but numbers easily reframe reality (7 September, p 46). For instance, the thought that only 10.6 per cent of people are now in extreme poverty didn’t bring me cheer. It means that more than 816 million people live on the edge of starvation. We are told to be cheerful because the percentage has dropped from 67.1 per cent in 1918.
But population increase means that the number in this state has dropped from 1,207,800,000 in 1918 to 816,200,000 now 鈥� so the number in extreme poverty has dropped by only 32.4 per cent. Yes, “factfulness” and accuracy of data are vital to our understanding of the world, but the desperate state of hundreds of millions of people is far more than a statistic.
What have the Roslings ever done for us, then? (2)
I wish I could share Ola Rosling’s optimistic view that the world is getting better if we look at the facts. Yes, we have reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty and increased life expectancy since 1918. But back then, we used less than one Earth’s worth of natural resources a year. We now every year.
In 1918, extreme poverty was spatially distributed. All we have done is redistribute it temporally, lifting billions out of poverty today by using the resources of tomorrow, ensuring that greater poverty returns in the future. I’ll celebrate when we are able to achieve the same improvements sustainably. Otherwise, we risk today’s benefits being a blip.
What have the Roslings ever done for us, then? (3)
The statement “our world really is improving” is a story that can neither be proved nor disproved with data. Statistics presented to buttress such stories are inevitably more or less cherry-picked.
For example, you present a graph of plane crash deaths starting in 1929. If it had started in 1800, as your graphs for literacy and infant mortality do, we would have to conclude that plane crash deaths are a lot worse than they used to be. The graph also doesn’t show that plane crash deaths make a minute contribution to human mortality.
What have the Roslings ever done for us, then? (4)
Jacob Aron’s very good interview with Ola Rosling is timely in pointing out the importance of facts. Your graphics show how absolute living standards have shifted over time, with the implication that we ignore how much better things are for many of us compared with the bleak existence our ancestors faced. But the irony is that we ignore how things improve absolutely because we are creatures of comparison.
As epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett describe in and , people generally compare themselves with the society they encounter daily. “Status anxiety” is responsible for a great deal of mental and physical ill health. Relative poverty is getting worse rather than better in many societies, including the UK.
We need every tool for emissions reduction
Adding bioethanol to petrol will wreck the environment, not save it, says Michael Le Page (27 July, p 23). This attack on one of the most effective tools we have for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from road transport does a disservice to the fight against climate change.
Arguments deployed against biofuels in general 鈥� deforestation, food price increases, creation of poverty 鈥� aren’t relevant to European ethanol production. In the EU, ethanol almost entirely from feedstock grown on existing EU farmland. This on food prices.
The EU’s recently adopted settled the question of which biofuel feedstocks create a high risk of land-use change. Those used for crop-based ethanol production in Europe 鈥� maize, wheat and sugar beet 鈥� are the threshold.
Achieving the EU’s goal for decarbonising the economy by 2050 will require every available tool for emissions reduction. Electric vehicles are one solution, but even in 2030, the majority of cars on the road will have internal combustion engines. Petrol blended with ethanol works in today’s engines and can be sold using existing infrastructure.
Do we really want to lose clinicians' skills to AI?
Donna Lu describes the training of AI as requiring large data sets and reminds us that the process by which AI reaches its predictions is opaque (17 August, p 7). Human clinicians learn by being exposed to data, but need considerably less information as they are guided by others who already have this expertise.
If AI comes to dominate, this expertise will be lost within about 20 years. Then we will become completely dependent on AI. Is this the brave new world we want?
Designers have a lot of back pain to answer for (1)
As Helen Thomson notes, a lot of back pain is due to bad posture (31 August, p 34). We need to sit and stand up straight, with our shoulders back, head held high and tail bone pointing down. That way, our core muscles support the spine and nerves don’t get pinched.
Designers have a lot to answer for, as most seating forces us into the opposite position. The choice to sit or stand should be adopted in workplaces.
Designers have a lot of back pain to answer for (2)
You present a graph of disability-adjusted life years lost to back pain. It seems to carry more information than was referred to in the article.
Between 1990 and 2015, there was a shift in the age of peak pain that could be as great as 25 years. May the root cause be traceable to some feature of childhood?
As a beekeeper, I see hints of rapid evolution
You report bees in Puerto Rico evolving to become less aggressive (17 August, p 38). I believe a similar process is happening in the UK in response to the varroa mite.
When I started keeping bees 15 years ago, these mites were a major problem, with all colonies in danger of dying out unless treated to reduce the numbers of mites. My colonies and others in south Wales now appear to have few or no varroa mites, even when not treated. I suspect there are two processes at work here. Some strains of bee are known to be more “hygienic” than others, being able to remove mites from the hive more effectively. A team at the University of Sussex to be sold to beekeepers. Could this hygienic trait have evolved in British bees?
UK beekeepers also report that queens, which used to live for 3 to 5 years, now usually last for one or two seasons at most. Many become unable to lay fertile eggs in their first few months.
While the colony produces a new queen, there is a “brood break” in which there are no bee larvae in the hive. That disrupts the varroa life cycle. The rapid turnover of queens is a nuisance for beekeepers, but could this be an example of rapid evolution?
An avenue of research into pervasive gum disease
Many diseases may be caused by the spread of Porphyromonas gingivalis, as Debora MacKenzie reports (10 August, p 42). This reminded me of Colin Barras describing the recently discovered Candidate Phyla Radiation (CPR) microbes that parasitise the mouth bacterium Actinomyces odontolyticus and help it evade the immune system (10 April, p 28).
P. gingivalis is a normal microbiome bacterium that dodges the immune system and causes chronic inflammation. It may be an interesting avenue of research to ask whether CPR bacteria help it do that.
A galaxy filled to the brim with utterly isolated life
Discussing the detection of alien life, Sarah Rugheimer notes Fermi’s paradox: where is everybody? Geometry may explain why we seem to be alone in the galaxy (31 August, p 42). Say the volume of our galaxy is about 1014 cubic light years. Suppose one billion technological civilisations currently exist in it.
On average, each of these could dominate a volume of about 105 cubic light years 鈥� a sphere about 29 light years in radius. That suggests a mean separation of about 57 light years.
If there were only a million such civilisations, the mean separation would be 575 light years. Barring faster-than-light communication, it seems that any conversation between neighbours, let alone a friendly visit, is impractical.
Imagining the “ansible” communicators created by author Ursula K. Le Guin or warp-drive spaceships may be attractive, but we have no reason to assume that anyone out there would be able to build them if we can’t.
I suspect that the galaxy is teeming with life, but that we won’t ever be able to talk to our nearest neighbours because we are too far out of hailing distance.
How would a species without sight see time?
Martin Greenwood summarises the view of physicist Roger Penrose that much scientific and mathematical thought is non-verbal (Letters, 31 August). A week earlier, another physicist, Lee Smolin, defined the “sky” of an event as a snapshot of what we see at any one instant, informing us of our relationships with the things around us (24 August, p 34).
Imagine a life form that had no sight, nor sensitivity to radiant heat. Would it be able to develop and test quantum and relativity theories? Might it find relativity easy to understand if its view of geometry wasn’t founded on a visual interpretation of dimensions? And to extend Derek Bolton’s question about mapping time and space to language (Letters, 31 August), how would it do that?
What a stimulating magazine!