Should we jump the gun on vaccination?
From River Axe-the-Tax, Manchester, UK
Simon Goodman expresses concern about Russian plans to roll out a coronavirus vaccine without the usual stage III clinical trials, rightly saying that these can help spot harm (Letters, 19 September). Similar concerns have to be raised about Donald Trump’s desire for a vaccine to be released before the US election.
But I question whether standard safety procedures are relevant in the current situation. In assessing the consequences of delaying widespread vaccination pending such a trial, we should consider not just the direct medical consequences to those infected, but also the effects of prolonged or repetitive lockdown on mental health and on the social and economic life of the community.
Some birds are seen as less fully fledged than others
From Brian Reffin Smith, Berlin, Germany
So many of the questions and answers within Eddy Keming Chen’s article “Welcome to the fuzzy-verse” seem, perhaps paradoxically given the article’s emphasis on mathematics, to be due to human choice, and hence to become impossibly vague (5 September, p 36). We can choose to think about things as if they were well defined, or not.
For instance, if you ask people to rate animals according to their “birdness”, where 0 is absolutely not a bird and 1 is totally a bird, I suppose a robin or an eagle would score a 1, an elephant a 0. But a penguin might score less than 1 and a bat would probably be more than 0. However, if you ask averagely informed people if a penguin or a bat is a bird, you would get the right answer.
Similarly, I define Chen’s contentious “bald” as H-1, where H is the number of hairs on my head.
A simple explanation for weird baby dinosaurs?
From Paul Wood, Hamilton, New Zealand
You report that baby titanosaurs had a sharp horn on their snout, something that was absent in any adult fossils, but offer few possible reasons for this difference (5 September, p 20). Perhaps it was there to help them break out of their egg, just as birds use their beaks to hatch today.
Why global greening won't keep climate change at bay
From Patrick Davey, Dublin, Ireland
Your article explores how the rate of carbon absorption by forests may alter as the climate changes (15 August, p 38).
While I was working in Uganda with Mountains of the Moon University, one of our central projects involved growing roses. We were about 300 metres higher than Entebe, where the majority of the flower industry is located, and our roses grew better.
The reason was related to lower night-time temperatures. During the day, photosynthesis generates sugars that store the energy for growth. Photosynthesis rises with temperature, but if temperatures are high at night, much of the sugar formed during the day is used to maintain night-time metabolism and not for growth.
Colder nights reduce the rate of metabolism, leaving the sugars to power growth. Thus it appears that although warmer days may offer some benefits to plants, these are likely to be outweighed by higher night-time temperatures, leading to reduced growth.
The only real option to tackle the damage we are doing to the planet’s climate is to reduce our carbon emissions.
Perhaps life's origins happened in slow motion
From Jim Ainsworth, Kingsland, Herefordshire, UK
As to which came first when life arose 鈥� structural integrity, metabolism or reproduction 鈥� Michael Marshall explains that it is possible all three happened at once (8 August, p 34). He adds that metabolism is the trickiest system to account for, since it involves “creating entire sequences of chemical reactions鈥� controlled by battalions of protein enzymes, which can’t have existed when life began”.
However, we learned in the previous edition that microbes may have existed deep beneath the sea for 100 million years in “minimally active mode”, with barely enough energy to power either metabolism or reproduction (1 August, p 13). This suggests that we should maybe cut the first proto-microbes some slack, at least allowing them a few million years in which to get one system going before another is fully functioning.
Maybe Venusians are just Martians, like us
From Dudley Miles, London, UK
You report that life in Venusian clouds “could upend our ideas about what life can be and how it arises” (19 September, p 7). However, we know that Martian rocks have travelled to Earth and a lesser quantity have travelled from Earth to Mars. There will have been a similar exchange between the two planets and Venus. Life on Venus, if it exists, may originate elsewhere.
As astrobiologists have pointed out, life on a moon of an outer planet would be more significant, as , so it would almost certainly have an independent origin.
One bit of science where reproducibility is a cinch
From Andrew Glassner, Seattle, Washington, US
Your interview with Stuart Ritchie paints a bleak picture for reproducibility in science (22 August, p 36). But taking all of science to task like this may be too broad-brushed.
In computer science, particularly in fields such as computer graphics and artificial intelligence, publications are now expected to include a link to a public repository, such as GitHub, providing the complete source code. Reproducibility is a snap: install the code and run it.
For all but the most gargantuan systems, every claim made by the authors can be easily confirmed or demonstrated to be false. This explicit mechanism for easy, objective reproducibility may partly explain the explosive growth of these fields.
Books can store carbon as well as knowledge
From Ro Scott, Cromarty, Ross-shire, UK
With reference to the letter from Eric Kvaalen on the long-term preservation of harvested timber as a carbon store, my favoured domestic carbon store is paper, in the form of books (Letters, 12 September). Around the world, libraries must contain a massive amount of sequestered carbon dioxide, some of it of great antiquity. Barring wars and pyromaniacs, these seem set to persist for the long term.
For the record 鈥� {03 October 2020}
For the record 鈥� {03 October 2020}
鈥� Private astronauts going to the International Space Station will be in addition to NASA astronauts, they won’t replace them (19 September, p 18).