Caution required when tinkering with plant diet
While the gradual shift to a more sustainable, plant-based diet globally is a good thing, I feel some concern at the news that UK company Moolec has created soya beans with 25 per cent pig protein (8 July, p 17).
I am one of the rare but growing number of people with mammalian meat allergy (caused by an allergic reaction to a sugar molecule on the surface of nearly all mammalian cells, which is triggered by an aberrant response to tick bites). So I would want either to know that such products had eliminated this sugar epitope or to be warned if foods contained it, so I could avoid them. Safe recourse to plant proteins could become more difficult.
Let's not get carried away with new definition of life
Using mass spectrometers in space missions to seek molecules with a high “assembly index” 鈥� an idea that springs from the new Assembly Theory of life that you reported on 鈥� is an interesting development in the search for extraterrestrial life (24 June, p 32).
Threshold values derived from life on Earth should be used with caution, however. Also, while detections exceeding the threshold could be considered a necessary condition for life, they wouldn’t, by themselves, be proof that it exists in that place.
A week of extreme heat raises a crucial question (1)
From
15 July, p 8
A week of extreme heat raises a crucial question (2)
In your article “A week of record-breaking heat”, you present a graph showing the rise of global temperatures over the past few decades. But why is there such a seasonal effect if the temperatures really are global?
To put it another way, why are temperatures during summer in the southern hemisphere so much lower than during summer in the northern hemisphere?
The editor writes:
Thanks for raising this. It is to do with there being more land in the northern hemisphere, which .
Any tips on escaping a six-dimensional maze?
In her mathematics of life column, Katie Steckles says you can solve a two-dimensional labyrinth by always turning left or right, so long as the wall you follow is connected to the outside of the maze. This left me wondering if it would work for 3D mazes, like cave systems (15 July, p 44). What about higher-dimension mazes, like a 4D maze whose components shift around over time? Is there a higher algorithm for solving 5D and 6D mazes too?
The worrying impact of fire thunderstorms
From , Canberra, Australia
You reported on research showing that “North American wildfires may be creating clouds over Europe”. It is said that this could constitute a new climate feedback loop. But there is more to it (24 June, p 15).
For decades, a wide-ranging group of researchers in a global collaboration have been studying pyrocumulonimbuses, also called pyroCbs or fire thunderstorms. These are important for a number of reasons, not least of which is the feedback loops they have with the atmosphere above.
PyroCbs are creating mayhem for human and biological communities, often on a locally unprecedented scale. Forest types are changing, 10,000-year-old peat soils are burning out all the way to the gravel beneath them and wildlife populations are in crisis. Pump massive amounts of black carbon from boreal forest fires over the Greenland ice cap and the result can’t be good.
Unlike normal wildfires, these events are full of feedback loops.
Metalwork theft was legal,if morally dubious
Irrespective of the ethics, Henry Cort’s patent for a new steel production process would have been legally valid, despite the idea being taken from Black metallurgists in Jamaica (15 July, p 14).
Britain’s Statute of Monopolies 1623 is generally treated as the foundation of the modern patent system. It was well established that the act included the introducers of new inventions. In other words, the first person to bring the details of a new device or process into this country from abroad was as much, according to the law, the true and first inventor as a person who developed an idea entirely there.
These so-called patents of importation were finally abolished in 1978, although they were more or less obsolete for a considerable time before then. In the US, the analogous concept was abolished in 2013.
Could this explain the odd features in galaxy's heart?
You report that “Weird filaments of gas are hiding at our galaxy’s centre”. These might have a logical explanation that depends on an understanding of the accretion layers surrounding Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central black hole (10 June, p 15).
Matter collapsing towards any black hole is slowed down by time dilation and “freezes” as it arrives there. In fact, as far as the external universe is concerned, it never quite gets there in a finite time. So, Sagittarius A* would be surrounded by layer on layer of collapsing matter, with extremely high density and pressure.
A star falling into these layers would create a shock wave that collides with itself on the other side of the black hole, causing a spurt of matter to be ejected. But time dilation would cause the wave to travel at different speeds in different levels and keep arriving over a long period of time, and so the spurt would keep spurting for ages. Thus, each filament is an epitaph to a star that died on the opposite side of Sagittarius A*.
Grounds to say lab-grown brains aren't conscious
Eric Kvaalen says that if consciousness arises out of brains, we should stop experiments on lab-grown organoids. But several lines of research have suggested that consciousness isn’t a property just of brains, but of whole organisms reacting with their environment. In this view, a sufficiently complex brain is necessary, but not sufficient, for consciousness to arise, and if that is so, we need have no worries about even much larger lab-grown brains that need constant supervision to stay alive (Letters, 24 June).