The one about making friends in the office (1)
In making the case for more time working face-to-face rather than from home, Robin Dunbar highlights friendship benefits of the former, adding that the ideal number of close friends for good health is five, including close family. This means most people have enough such friends without needing any at work (10 February, p 21).
In addition, the continued strong profitability of companies throughout and after the covid-19 lockdowns belies the idea that working from home somehow diminishes productivity, not to mention the impact on emissions-generating commutes. For people who love the office because of its social nature, no one is stopping you from making the journey there.
The one about making friends in the office (2)
Dunbar suggests other people’s experiences of working from home were very different from my own. Lockdowns meant no long commute each day and very few interruptions, allowing me to get more done. It is nice to work with friends, but I have friends who will remain with me beyond this job.
A good motivation to work is authorship
Motivation is very important in any arduous task, as David Robson highlights, but the bigger challenge is often how to maintain it. For example, much research is difficult, frustrating and prone to setbacks and possible failure. However, in supervising young, ambitious students, I found that the carrot of a probable publication with themselves as a prominent author was a strong incentive to work hard and overcome hurdles in order to bring the research to a satisfactory conclusion (3 February, p 44).
Supersonic cargo planes may appeal to military
Peter Leach quite rightly derides NASA working on commercial supersonic flight. However, there is one potential important customer: the US military, which probably lacks the expertise to develop large supersonic aircraft (Letters, 10 February).
I can imagine it needing these to move specialist personnel and mission-specific equipment from a central base in the US to a “hotspot” at short notice. This would seem to be more cost-effective than relying on having numerous supply depots with a broad range of equipment and personnel around the world.
Wise to widen the search for a theory of everything (1)
Physicists may have stalled in their search for the theory of everything because of the presumption that the universe is limited to three spatial dimensions. If they are now going to use geometry in their hunt for a final theory, they may be able to get somewhere by investigating the use of tesseracts or other higher-dimensional geometric objects (10 February, p 32).
Wise to widen the search for a theory of everything (2)
The search for a neatly packaged theory of everything is fun and fascinating. It is often difficult for the average science buff to follow the brilliant work of geniuses. However, I believe that we wrongly expect there to be a lower “size” limit to our universe, which suggests a boundary 鈥� albeit usefully 鈥� in our search for fundamental entities.
I see no reason why the descent in size, from visible objects to hypothetical strings, shouldn’t keep going, just as it probably grows ever greater in the other direction. As Werner Heisenberg famously noted: “Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
No bone to pick with the makers of meat loaf
You report the idea of grinding bones to make edible paste. In a case in point, my young son loves meat loaf. My wife and I noticed that the texture of it changed in all our usual shop-bought versions and thought there must have been some shift in ingredients that was so compelling that widespread adoption happened quickly. Our suspicion was reinforced when we noticed tiny, hard particles, which, under closer examination, looked like bone fragments. It seems like they had added bone puree (13 January, p 11).
As environmentalists, we are aware of food waste issues. Using bone paste could mean fewer animals sacrificed to satisfy the craving for meat, ideally edging us closer to not eating animals at all.
Could some have a super sense for pheromones?
Even among humans, with our inferior olfactory senses, some of us can taste and detect scents better than others. Does the hunt for human pheromones take into account that some people may be better at emitting and/or receiving these signals? On a similar note, I have always been intrigued by the idea that menstrual cycles can be synchronised among groups, which has defied proof. Here, again, perhaps a “dominant” transmitter in the group emits a chemical signal to other members (27 January, p 35).
School students must return to pen and paper
Many previous studies have found that taking notes with pencil and paper in class or when revising is more effective than doing so with a keyboard, but it was interesting to read your report on the possible neurological explanation for this effect. In light of the evidence, it would seem wrong to pursue the idea of schools issuing laptops to all students. Giving them exercise books or notepads along with pencils and pens would be cheaper and much more effective (3 February, p 19).
On the fate of record-breaking fusion reactor
You say that decommissioning the JET fusion reactor in the UK might take 16 years. Some people might wonder why it takes so long. The reactor has been exposed to high neutron fluxes and much of it is , so needs to be appropriately dealt with (17 February, p 13).
You also mention the value of tritium, some of which may be embedded in the reactor and is possibly recoverable. But that may be less of a consideration in this phase. Tritium is radioactive, with a half-life of just over 12 years. By the time decommissioning is over, much of it will be gone.