How the news of feathered dinosaurs lifted off
As the reporter who broke the story of the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, I enjoyed Michael Benton’s feature (16 October, p 43). It was in fact 快猫短视频 that carried my story, just before the work was unveiled at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Before the meeting, I picked up reports of a surprising discovery in China. After some detective work, a contact told me it was “a little feathered dinosaur”. I persuaded the news editor to squeeze it into the upcoming issue. To follow up, I took the train from Boston to New York and slept on my sister’s couch in the suburbs so I could attend the meeting. I then went on to write about palaeontologists travelling to China to see the feathered fossil.
This was one of the most exciting stories I have covered, one that revolutionised our understanding of dinosaurs and birds.
Children are natural scientists until school
From your review of Ada Twist, 快猫短视频, I am looking forward to seeing it (16 October, p 36). However, it occurred to me that young children don’t need to be encouraged to be scientists.
My granddaughter’s second birthday is coming up and she has been engaging in increasingly sophisticated experimental investigations since she was old enough to hold things.
My impression is that, in pursuit of government league table success, UK schools educate scientific curiosity out of children because it is incompatible with the inflexible, one-way nature of the national curriculum.
According to the increasingly disillusioned teachers with whom I have discussed this, even science subjects are taught as a set of handed-down facts to learn so as to pass the exams, not as a framework of knowledge with which to ask questions.
Recycling systems need to cover much more
Regarding the debate over a bin tax to encourage recycling, we need systems that can deal with many kinds of waste (25 September, p 18). There is already one for anaerobic digestion of all organic matter: the sewage treatment system. In principle, the methane it produces could be fed into the grid and help reduce the currently rising price of gas. If it could take kitchen and garden waste; agricultural waste, such as straw and manure; culled animals; building waste, such as cardboard and wood; and even human cadavers, then the amount of methane generated might be significant and useful.
A paradoxical problem in the black hole paradox
In his article on the black hole information paradox, Paul Davies postulates a “residual connection reaching across the event horizon” between entangled pairs of particles of Hawking radiation (25 September, p 34). One particle travels back across the event horizon of the black hole, and the other travels away.
With one of the pair moving towards intense gravity and the other away from it, wouldn’t the entanglement be immediately broken by the disparity in the passage of time experienced by each particle?
If their entanglement isn’t broken, what effect would synchronising between different timescales have on the particles’ information ?
Not quite time for AI to show human-like skills
Eric Kvaalen, Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Robert Checchio writes that “the GPT-3 AI discussed in your article is reported to have 175 billion artificial neurons (twice that of a human brain)” and so some might expect human-like behaviour to appear soon (Letters, 23 October). But in your feature (9 October), you said 175 billion parameters, not neurons, roughly equivalent to the number of synapses. You also indicate that the human brain has “150 trillion” synapses, meaning GPT-3 is nearly a thousand times smaller.
The promise of eradicating Lyme disease
A reliably safe and effective treatment for Lyme disease in humans would be a prize indeed (16 October, p 24). If hygromycin A were to live up to its early promise and become a medicine for acute Lyme disease, it would not only be a welcome development for new patients, but it might also have implications for established patients because it might provide a double-check on the current diagnostic system.
An estimated 10 per cent of people with Lyme disease report continuing ill health in spite of treatment and can be subject to having their Lyme diagnosis questioned (6 June 2020, p 40). If research goes as hoped and a medicine results, a humane way of proceeding might be to offer people with a Lyme or Lyme-like symptomatology an exploratory round of the new treatment. Given that diagnosis status still largely relies on blood tests, which don’t seem completely reliable, this would be a chance to learn more about the needs of these patients.
However, such spirochaetal diseases should be treated as early as possible for the best outcome. Trying a treatment after time had elapsed would be a voyage into the unknown for longer-term patients and it would be better not to raise unrealistic hopes.
It is time to forget about repressed memories
I am grateful to Jessica Hamzelou for her insightful article on repressed memory, or dissociative amnesia as it is now termed (9 October, p 44). Whatever it is called, it has led to many vulnerable people being let down by those they sought help from, causing great damage.
After qualifying as a psychologist in 2000, I was appalled at the seeming obsession of some fully trained professional therapists or counsellors about abuse and their assumption that it was likely to have occurred, with no evidence of this being the case.
There is a condition called transient global amnesia in which a traumatic event isn’t stored by the brain at all, thus no amount of therapy could “retrieve” it, but no scientific evidence that detailed traumatic memories are hidden away and can be revealed later by a therapist. I hope this article helps to put a stop to the continuing practice by some well-meaning though misguided professionals and that dissociative amnesia is finally removed from diagnostic manuals.