The many ways this virus affects our social norms
Further to your look at social disruption amid the pandemic, two other factors affecting interaction are the inability to read facial expressions when everyone is wearing a mask and the need to distance yourself from people to a far greater extent than our cultural norms would dictate (15 August, p 32).
When speaking with strangers, they can’t read your mood, so communication can be awkward, even rude. Similarly, dodging and weaving to keep a metre and a half away from people while outside feels as if you are shunning them.
Make covid-19 vaccines mandatory to go overseas?
A person’s freedom to be unvaccinated doesn’t outweigh my freedom not to be infected by the coronavirus (Leader, 15 August). Even if it isn’t made compulsory for everyone, international travellers should be obliged to be vaccinated.
Some of your readers may recall that in the 1950s and 60s there were many countries, including in Europe, that demanded a certificate of smallpox vaccination for foreign visitors. No certificate, no entry.
Such measures were accepted by travellers without protest. That helped to eradicate smallpox. We will need a similar international regulation on coronavirus vaccinations, unless we are to fight the virus from a severely weakened position.
Make covid-19 vaccines mandatory to go overseas? (2)
The World Health Organization has overlooked the most important group in need of vaccination: mothers. I won’t dwell on the tragic consequences for a dead mother’s children, but ask the mainly male policy-makers to calculate the cost to the economy of the death of a primary carer. As someone over the age of 65, I would gladly give my vaccine to any mother anywhere.
Other uses of the vagus nerve weren't so great
Your story on a device that stimulates the vagus nerve to aid language learning prompted a memory of the so-called Alderman’s nerve, the auricular branch of the vagus (15 August, p 21). This seems to be the same part that is the focus of that device.
It is said that vagal stimulation of a sort was in use centuries ago by overindulgent aldermen at civic banquets. The application of a few drops of rose water to the earlobe was thought to trigger an increase in gut peristalsis, which would thus make room for more food.
Squatting may not be good for everyone
Despite the cardiovascular benefits of avoiding excessive use of chairs and sofas, we shouldn’t assume that the benefits of squatting felt by the Hadza people will apply to people of European descent in the same way (18 July, p 28).
The higher prevalence among European-descended people of gene variants that lead to hypercoagulability of the blood, such as Factor V Leiden, combined with the compression of lower limb veins while squatting could have an adverse impact.
We could do more to make forests lock away carbon
The trouble with using forests as carbon sinks is that rotting puts carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere (15 August, p 38). If we really want to reduce the carbon dioxide in the air, we should harvest wood from the forests and store it, either as wood, charcoal or some other carbon-containing substance.
Science may have issues, but that isn't one of them
In your interview with Stuart Ritchie on problems in science, you quote him as saying: “People who finish their PhDs now are expected to have some astonishingly high number of peer-reviewed publications, something like 19 (22 August, p 36). A few years ago, you’d be expected to have five or six.” That isn’t the case.
“People who finish their PhDs” appears to refer to PhD students who have just completed a thesis. They have never been expected to have peer-reviewed publications, if only because it takes too long to get them published.
The editor writes: Stuart Ritchie has clarified that his take on this applies only to some PhDs.
Life's beginnings may have been turbulent
The latest ideas to explain the origin of cellular life may overlook the effects of turbulence and shear in liquids (8 August, p 34). These are what make dispersions, akin to mayonnaise, that can encapsulate chemicals in a film of oily substance without the need for self-assembly.
Instead of cells arising from individual homogeneous chemical solutions on a small scale, for example in a pool, we should think of a disturbed situation 鈥� running water, rocks or ice falling into water, bubbles coming up, thermal convection 鈥� in which the composition is constantly varying, with films of oily material that perhaps arise sometimes.
This chaotic situation would produce trillions of permutations of chemicals that were more or less encapsulated, very occasionally producing something like a cell.
Another knotty problem could be solved
A useful piece of advice that I have imparted to friends and relatives is that if you want to stop a piece of string or a cord from randomly tangling itself into a knot, then fasten the two loose ends together (8 August, p 46). I have also joked that there is a formula describing an extension cord with both ends plugged together that can prove a knot would never form, but that it would take too long to write down.
Having read your interview with Lisa Piccirillo on the Conway knot, it seems there may actually be such an equation. She says that a trivial knot can be untangled without unplugging it, whereas a hot mess knot can’t. Can we also say that a trivial knot that has its ends plugged together can never form a hot mess knot, and prove it using a fourth dimension?
For the record 鈥� {12 Sep 2020}
Our description of punched cards in early digital computers was the wrong way round. A hole was a 1 and solid card represented a 0 (25 July, p 36).