Dealing with coughs and sneezes isn't always easy (1)
Jonathan Goodman says we should ensure that coughing and sneezing in public is treated as a social crime (19 March, p 27). I disagree.
He compares such behaviours with exposure to human waste. The chances of the latter are slim, while it is easily possible to cough and sneeze without having an infectious disease. Speaking as someone who has endured many summers with hay fever, I know the misery of sneezing, sniffing, having a runny nose and feeling unwell. The last thing I want is to be reviled in public by the self-appointed health police.
By all means, the public should do all it can on personal hygiene, but don’t start persecuting people with long-standing health conditions.
Dealing with coughs and sneezes isn't always easy (2)
I agree about the need to cover our mouths and noses when we cough or sneeze. But more than that, the policy should be that when you are sick, you don’t go to the workplace.
I was in a company where we had an allowance of sick days per year, but only if you went and sat in a waiting room to see a doctor and got a note from them. People would either do that and spread virus in the waiting room, or just forget it and go to work.
Some people might abuse the new approach and take days off when they aren’t actually sick, but I think that is a price worth paying for less disease overall.
Good to correct Victorian distortions of biology
As Lucy Cooke argues, there is little doubt that Victorian patriarchal attitudes influenced the interpretations that 19th-century biologists placed on animal behaviour and led them to some incorrect conclusions (12 March, p 27). The amazing diversity of life is reflected in a similar diversity of sexual behaviours in the animal kingdom, and the advances in our understanding of this, many made by female scientists, are welcome.
I was disappointed, however, by Cooke’s assertion that a “feminist perspective is urgently needed” in the study of animal sexual behaviour. Research should never be driven by an ideological perspective, as it risks reaching conclusions that are just as wrong as those made by the Victorians.
Try to land a plane and a harsh reality may dawn
Many non-pilots may believe they can land a plane after watching a YouTube video, but they might think twice if faced with reality (26 March, p 15).
Certainly, if this applied to an airliner, even if you managed to touch it down, you would then be driving a 120-tonne racing car with unfamiliar handling as it bounced along 鈥� and yes, they do bounce.
As a former glider pilot, I reckon I could land one if necessary, provided I had a professional pilot talking me through everything and was in perfect conditions, but the plane might not be all in one piece afterwards.
Perhaps Stonehenge is to do with the moon's phases
The idea that 30 stones in a circle at Stonehenge represent the days of a month is a bit odd (12 March, p 21). The sun doesn’t circle the site at all, let alone once a month. The people who built Stonehenge were farmers, not factory workers. They didn’t care what day it was, they were more interested in seasons.
What would be interesting is if Stonehenge could track the phases of the moon as well as the sun. Some farmers sow their fields , around the vernal equinox.
So many places where we could up the tree count
Victoria Hiley suggests turning car parks into woodlands (Letters, 12 March). We could also go back to planting standard trees into hedges, particularly alongside roads, and in streets within towns. In addition to sequestering carbon, this would help wildlife and provide shade to reduce summer temperatures.
I am reminded of a yesteryear description of the UK’s New Forest by someone who called it “the most beautiful arms factory that I’ve worked in”. This is a reference to the fact that many of the woodlands were planted after the Napoleonic wars to provide trees to build future naval ships.
We must embrace solutions that, while perhaps not perfect, provide multiple benefits to society with minimum disruption.
Let's talk about the puffin-rabbit relationship
In the article on the fate of rabbits, it is mentioned that puffins use rabbit burrows for nests (19 March, p 43).
The naturalist Ronald Lockley addressed this in a paper in British Birds in 1937 looking at puffins on Skokholm, an island to which your story refers. He concluded puffins will and do use rabbit burrows, but their bills and feet equip them well for digging their own. He also found that rabbits cause damage to puffin burrows. So puffins will do fine without rabbits.
If something is beyond testing, then is it science?
I appreciated Tom Gauld’s cartoon depicting a physics professor stressed out by the bizarre theories in parts of the field that no one actually understands (12 March, p 55).
I have noticed that some of your physics articles present ideas that aren’t currently testable, and in many cases may never be tested. Since a requirement of scientific study is that we can test our predictions, I often wonder if physics is a real science.
There are other solutions to some nuclear waste
You report that the latest estimate for the cost of an underground repository for UK nuclear waste has risen to as much as 拢53 billion, which includes storing legacy uranium and plutonium that were deemed an “asset in the past” (5 March, p 19).
I wonder if many people are aware that a new generation of nuclear power companies, such as the UK’s , can run their newly designed, low-pressure, molten salt-cooled reactors on nuclear waste and the aforementioned stockpiles.
These kinds of technologies that can deal with nuclear waste and make energy from some of it will be operating within a decade, and perhaps much sooner if we have the will to back it.