When eating out, try the secret sauce diet
When it comes to calorie counts on menus as a nudge to eat more healthily, it is clear to me that a large proportion of calories in some meals are in the sauce. Restaurants don’t mind showing the inflated calorie count because it doesn’t deter the average customer. Having studied energy balance in obesity, for me the answer is simple: hold the sauce (30 November, p 14).
Plant cooling sounds fine, but only if it's kept green
The idea of using vegetation on buildings to cool them in hot climates is interesting. However, an architect friend fears certain problems. The last thing you want around buildings and walls is something that can catch and propagate fire easily. Dried plants (in very hot climates) potentially could. Installing vegetation on balconies or roofs presupposes a system will be in place and maintained to make sure the plants don’t dry up and die, which could increase cost tremendously (23 November, p 36).
Women probably invented the wheel
Having given birth to a daughter whose size and weight increased over the years, necessitating the use of a pram, stroller, trolley, cart and motor vehicle, I have always suspected that women invented the wheel. This was reinforced by my daughter’s instinctive preference for any toy with wheels, and her invention of a skateboard carriage for her pet cat, Freckles (23 November, p 17).
The 12,000-year-old wheel-like stones resembling spindle whorls invented to spin thread, that you report on, would certainly have inspired overburdened women, during a further 6000 years, to develop wheeled vehicles.
Sci-fi may be a truly ancient genre
Frankenstein is one of my favourite novels. However, I, like many others, contest the notion that it is the first science fiction (Leader, 30 November).
There are many prior examples of what we would today consider sci-fi, if we define that as proposing a novel technology for the time and exploring the consequences.
For instance, in the 1600s, Church of England bishop Francis Godwin wrote The Man in the Moone, an account of a trip to the moon using a flock of swans harnessed to a vessel. At the time, it was a scientifically acceptable proposition that missing birds migrated to the moon in winter, so this would be what we now call “hard sci-fi”, proposing a scientifically plausible scenario. He even described the low gravity on the moon. I could go on.
Mars colony: it would be a valuable back-up plan
I have digested the explanations for why trying to live on Mars is a bad idea. Very good points are made, but one important thing is missed. One day, a disaster will befall Earth that will most likely wipe out the human race. It might be an extinction type asteroid impact, a nuclear war, a pandemic, global warming or something we haven’t thought of yet. If you think we should do our very best to preserve our species, then I believe that Mars is pivotal (16 November, p 48).
We don’t even need to fully colonise it. When visiting Mars, people would need to stay for at least a year because of orbital dynamics. A transient colony of a few thousand could be maintained on an ongoing basis. At least then we would have the possibility of recolonising Earth after a disaster.
Why haven't chimps made a greater leap forward?
If chimpanzee communities are becoming more technologically advanced over time, why is it that after millions of years of existence all they can manage is to use sticks to fish for termites? Their tools may be biodegradable, but they don’t make baskets, ropes or other things our ancestors probably did (30 November, p 13).
Technology is spoiling the beautiful game
Throwing more technology at football’s video assistant referee system is the wrong approach to its perceived problems (23 November, p 40).
Alongside football’s fundamental character, which places human deceit above brute force (as Maradona described it), one of the arguably beneficial features of the game is the reliance on the judgement of its arbiters. This involves acknowledging their human limitations and contributes one more factor to the randomness that attracts, as much as it dismays, its fans.
Burdening a game that was adopted worldwide for its beauty, and its sparse need for equipment, with more cameras, sensors and statistical models will make it less economically practical in many countries.
One big solution for food could transform things
“Recipe for disaster” certainly got my attention. It made it clear just how serious a matter climate change is likely to be for farming and food production. It then talks about solutions, stating: one big answer is eating less meat (16 November, p 44).
The article later advised against buying organic food because it isn’t as efficient per hectare of land. Well, if the world took the big solution seriously and reduced meat and dairy consumption, we would need only a fraction of the land to grow enough food, and we could rewild the rest of it.
Organic farming is about sustainability, creating healthy soils and treating animals well. What is the point of efficiency if we continue to lose topsoil? On top of that, agrochemicals are energy intensive, thus adding to carbon emissions.
More than microbial DNA on asteroid sample?
My only surprise was that the researchers looking down their microscope at asteroid rock samples only saw terrestrial bacterial contamination and not golden retriever dog hair, which permeates the entire universe (30 November, p 15).
For the record
In quick crossword #172 (30 November, p 45), the clue for 7 Down should have been Rb.