Sorry, but who is footing the bill for a vaccine?
Discussing how soon we may have a vaccine against covid-19, Carrie Arnold writes of “the stark realisation during the West African Ebola outbreak that Big Pharma could no longer be relied upon to solely underwrite expensive vaccine research” (21 March, p 44). I take umbrage at this.
As you have reported, pharmaceutical firms spend a small fraction of their revenue on research and development (for example, 3 June 2017, p 22).
Their expenditure is actually only a small proportion of the total cost of development, because most of their work is founded on existing research carried out at academic institutions and healthcare organisations funded by taxpayers, patients and students, for which the companies pay little or nothing.
Drugs show us the effects of banning markets
Chris Walzer at the US Wildlife Conservation Society is right to be concerned that a ban on wildlife markets in China could drive the trade underground (7 March, p 23). As Adam Vaughan points out, this occurred when markets were suspended in the aftermath of SARS, and led to further spread of the virus responsible.
The trade in illegal drugs should give some clues as to how people might act if they feel the law is unwarranted or unfairly impinges on their civil rights. are available in greater quantities and compete for black market cash.
Working with people so they can operate more safely, perhaps by separating areas of markets or providing vets, might be a better strategy to consider.
Letting the people choose to walk their own path (1)
Footpaths should be added after people have used an area for a while so users decide where the paths should be, suggests Frank Bover (Letters, 21 March). This method has been used for decades by planners of new universities and college campuses. Michigan State University has paths designed this way: an shows paths at unusual angles that take efficient routes.
Failure to do this invariably results in “desire paths”, where people take shortcuts and ignore the fixed paths, a clear indication of poor planning. Going one step further, the corridors of the at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago were designed to follow routes taken by students across the open field it was built on.
Letting the people choose to walk their own path (2)
You have previously reported a mathematical model of the interactions between walkers and developing shortcuts (5 July 1997, p 11). It is a good idea, although I suspect that architects will still strive to please their clients rather than the end users.
Letting the people choose to walk their own path (3)
I can confirm that the pedestrian method works. When I was an overseas volunteer at a school in the Pacific Islands in 1976, I was given the task of laying concrete footpaths between the buildings before the onset of the wet season.
I ignored the headmaster’s planned layout and waited for a few weeks to see where the pupils actually walked between buildings. Then I laid the footpaths along the clear tracks made in the grass.
These paths worked perfectly when the rains came.
There's more to the TikTok story than its sudden rise
Chris Stokel-Walker asks why the video-sharing platform TikTok has risen so quickly (14 March, p 31). This is an interesting question, but so, too, are the concerns in the US that the app threatens national security (14 December 2019, p 14).
Saving the world takes much more than trees
Adam Vaughan discusses plans to plant trees to lock away carbon dioxide (29 February, p 20). These won’t work here in Australia. In the most recent bush-fire season, around 126,000 square kilometres of vegetation and more than a billion animals were burned. We have to address the main causes of climate change.
Time and again, studies inform us that renewable energy is cheaper and better for the environment than fossil fuel sources. Yet in Australia, to my embarrassment, we have had governments that claim the economy is reliant on them. It costs billions of dollars to recover from bush-fire damage caused by climate change, which is unsustainable each summer and is completely ignored. The only logical explanation for this is greed.
Addressing the climate catastrophe is impossible when governments lack policies to entirely replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, subsidise the use of electric vehicles and reduce population increases. Sustainable growth, not greed, is the only option for a habitable future.
Now is the time to think of recycling new materials
Donna Lu reports new lightweight materials made of gallium, indium and glass bubbles (14 March, p 12). In the same issue, Layal Liverpool describes a gold-coated fabric that can emit light in different patterns (p 18). These seem remarkable from a technological point of view, but I wonder how recyclable such materials would be? If they aren’t, should we be developing them in the first place?
Is there any mystery about matter and antimatter? (1)
Richard Webb’s discussion of efforts to make large amounts of anti-atoms in an antimatter factory made interesting reading (29 February, p 44). I remember when physicist Richard Feynman suggested in the early 1970s that, when we map matter and antimatter creation and annihilation, the antimatter could be portrayed as normal matter going backwards in time.
Thus the paths of a pair of matter and antimatter particles through space-time, followed by their annihilation, could be portrayed as a single electron that travels back and then forward in time to eventually appear as one electron again.
Is there any mystery about matter and antimatter? (2)
Webb asks whether matter and antimatter repel each other gravitationally. The majority of physicists have long felt they have good reason to believe that antimatter reacts to gravity in the same way as matter.
In 1958, pointed out that experiments looking for a difference between the gravitational and the inertial masses of atoms would have found differences in the reaction to gravity of paired matter and antimatter particles (). Last year, Allen Caldwell and Gia Dvali argued that any difference in gravitational forces exerted on matter and antimatter must be beyond the sensitivity of current measurements ().
And in 2014, Marcoen Cabbolet argued that a difference between the reactions of matter and antimatter to gravity is incompatible with quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics ().
Astronomical colouring happened before Hubble
Leah Crane describes the use of three-filter colour combination in Hubble Space Telescope images (7 March, p 34). They weren’t the first to yield astronomical colours using this technique. In particular, there were the superb images that produced from the 1970s onwards at what was then the Anglo-Australian Observatory. These were mostly created by combining colour-separated black and white photos taken through three different colour filters.
Malin generally tried to balance the result to the response of the human eye, but as Crane’s article explains, there are difficulties of contrast and saturation. He mitigated these through special photographic techniques such as unsharp masking. These images had a huge impact at the time.
Other metals may have antimicrobial powers
You report that one mechanism by which silver prevents harmful bacteria spreading has been clarified (7 March, p 15). In 1989, and again in 2009, I was too ill to work. It seemed to me that the cause was bacteria and fungi growing in air conditioning ducts in relatively new buildings.
When I worked in buildings constructed before 1980, I had no problem. The ductwork in these was made of zinc-coated steel. The newer ducts were aluminium. Maybe other metals have antimicrobial properties too.
The reality of reality for my grandson and I
Your exploration of the problems of reality is fun and fascinating, but it deals with two very different concepts: accepting reality and understanding how it all works (1 February, p 34).
To give a simple analogy: at our farm, because I am a biologist, I understand a lot about how the grass, trees and other plants function. I know about their complex cellular structures and the chemical reactions that enable them to live and grow, powered by photon wave-functions collapsing with nary a human in sight. Seb, my 2-year-old grandson, knows nothing of this. But the grass, trees and other plants are just as real to him as they are to me.
Our knowledge of how the universe functions is incomplete, but this has no relevance to its reality. Was it less real in the 14th century, before Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, when we had even less idea how it functioned?
There must be a difference between these two frogs
Colin Walls offers a simple and superficially attractive way of thinking about life and death (Letters, 7 March). But frogs die 鈥� like the rest of us 鈥� from natural causes, and presumably some must die while hibernating.
So consider two otherwise identical frogs lying frozen side by side. One is in suspended animation. The other is dead. When warm weather arrives, one will revive and go about its froggy business. The other will thaw and rot. There must surely be biochemical or neurological differences between the two.
In one sense, we're lost in the wild most of the time
Michael Bond reports research on what people do when lost in the wild (29 February, p 40). It strikes me that the way people behave in such situations describes much of the human condition. The untrained human imagination constantly projects our concerns into the future.
Since we can’t truly predict or control that future, we are, in a sense, lost in an unknown “wilderness”. This lets diverse and subtle fears affect our reasoning and propel our behaviour in many unwise ways.
For the record 鈥� 4 April 2020
鈥� Disrupting the coronavirus’s ability to copy itself can help those with covid-19 because it can stop the virus entering more cells (21 March, p 10).