Give animal feelings the benefit of the doubt
When I qualified as a vet in 1981, I would have agreed with Marlene Zuk that we should question the trend of attributing human-like motivations and feelings to animals, such as bees “playing” with objects(14 January, p 27).
Now, after a 40-year career working on many continents and with many classes of animals, including insects, I have come to the opposite view. Unless science can prove that a living organism isn’t sentient like us, can’t feel stress and anxiety, doesn’t play and doesn’t feel fundamental emotions, we might do better to assume it does.
Could we have created the ancient warped trees?
Another explanation for really ancient trees having twisted trunks and branches is that they are less attractive for harvesting for timber. In other words, artificial selection is at work(14 January, p 11).
I have speculated that this is why the Sydney red gum (Angophora costata) has such twisted branches. The ones with straight trunks and branches were chopped down when European colonists arrived, which changed the gene pool to favour “unattractive” specimens.
Nature has all the best answers to storing water
You report that California is beset with longer periods of drought interspersed with ever heavier rainfall events. The heavier the rainfall, the more of this lovely water flows to the sea and is lost. Hence the various plans listed to try to save this water and allow it to recharge aquifers, where it is safe from evaporation. This all sounds like it would cost a fortune(14 January, p 7).
Fortunately, there is a furry little alternative. Beavers build dams for free, and all they ask for is a supply of deciduous trees. Added benefits are a rise in biodiversity, a great improvement in water quality, flood mitigation and increased stream flow in drought periods.
Time for an escape capsule for satellites too
With the “anomaly” in the Virgin Orbit satellite deployment, would it not be of all-round benefit to develop a subsystem that could save the payload when missions like this run into trouble?
Astronauts often have a separate escape system for when launches go wrong(14 January, p 9). Couldn’t a similar system be developed for satellites? It was sad to hear of this failure, but what if the James Webb Space Telescope had been lost?
I fear mega wind turbines may affect the weather
You recently carried an article on the development of supersized wind turbines with the potential for generating 50 megawatts of power from a single device. In the same issue 鈥� in “The limits of knowledge” (p 38) 鈥� you say that “the behaviour of some systems are sensitive to even the tiniest difference in starting conditions” of which the weather is a classic example, adding that small changes on one day can result in unpredictable storms the next(14 January, p 20).
It seems possible that extracting 50 MW of power from the wind might be just such a small change. Could this lead to unpredictable consequences such as extreme storms? We should investigate.
A possible answer to the leftie sloth mystery
The article “Sloths grip stronger than humans and other primates” states there is an unexplained left-side bias in their strength. Here is a possible explanation. If, , they favour using their right hands for fiddly tasks, then they would be hanging on a lot more with their left hands, which would get significantly more exercise and become stronger(14 January, p 13).
Undergraduate teaching can be less blinkered
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s view on the sometimes overly narrow scope of some university science programmes made me reflect on my own experience(7 January, p 22).
As a natural sciences student, I started with a limited number of module options with lecture notes that mostly told us “how things are”. As I progressed, module choices became more specialised and I focused on the subjects that really piqued my interest.
In my third and final year, I really felt like I was experiencing the reality of a life in scientific research. Lectures were designed to explore how one observation can have multiple competing hypotheses, encouraging us to delve into the literature and fill our essays with our own critical analysis. A university programme can change in style as skills build.
Sonification is great and has been around for years
My colleague Alice Preston and I were delighted by your article on sonification of astronomical data(31 December 2022, p 46).
However, we were amused by the suggestion that this is new territory because we presented a range of sonification projects at a conference in 2004. In addition, the International Community for Auditory Display, which seems to have started in 1994, has 119 astronomy examples in its data sonification . Its next conference is in Sweden in June.
Warm connections at risk in the internet age
, St Just in Roseland, Cornwall, UK
In “How to be happy”, Robert Waldinger says we evolved to be social animals and that “having warm connections with other people predicts how long you stay healthy”. Yet now we live in an age of connection via smart devices, which could be viewed as less than warm. We are left with an absence of the physical contact we had as we evolved into social animals. I wonder if this is taking a toll(14 January, p 46).
Ready for the great split into two human species?
You report that “city-slicker” lizards are becoming genetically distinct from their rural relatives(14 January, p 12). What goes for lizards may well go for us. How far are we along the evolutionary path to Eloi and Morlocks? When will humans start to diverge, perhaps along urban and rural lines?