Beware strange orcas bearing gifts
It is interesting that altruism was used to explain why orcas were apparently offering people gifts. This is based on a human trait, but there is another possible explanation also based on human activity. We frequently offer small edible titbits, usually on the end of a line, with the purpose of securing much larger eatables. Can the researchers be sure that what they are being offered isn’t bait? Before venturing into the sea to accept the “gifts”, I feel we ought to be absolutely certain of the motives of these apparent benefactors(12 July, p 19).
Inequality is about more than invisible rivalry
Your headline “The enemy within” echoes the phrase that UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher used to demonise striking miners in 1984/85. The ruling class planned to crush the National Union of Mineworkers to pave the way for deregulation and privatisation. There was no “invisible rivalry”, just open and often brutal class war. Cooperation and solidarity kept mining communities going for over a year. But the ruling class, using the instruments of state and media, crushed the resistance(12 July, p 38).
The pattern of class struggles is a better basis for understanding gross inequality than the theories of invisible rivalry in your piece.
How to ensure home solar can't be hacked
You report on home solar being vulnerable to hacks that could derail power grids. My solar installation poses little or no threat as its design limits its output to the grid so that, in the event of there being no demand for its electricity, it will detect this and reduce output appropriately(12 July, p 11).
I insisted on it having no internet connection via which the parameters controlling these behaviours could be interfered with. I did this because of the primitive nature of the security arrangements. If you know the password for such systems, you can not only read performance data, you can also change the parameters, possibly leading to destruction of the inverter or instability in the grid. This is a formula for ransom demands.
Wallaby poop may have spread plants far and wide
The discovery of wallaby and bandicoot bones on islands near New Guinea and in Indonesia is fascinating. The fact that ancient humans took them there alive implies that seeds of the animals’ food plants could have survived in their guts and been deposited on arrival to colonise new land. The presence of disconnected populations of non-crop plant species beyond their endemic ranges could offer clues to the past movements of humans whose remains haven’t yet been found(5 July, p 19).
Baby gene screening is wrong in so many ways
I couldn’t agree more with Suzanne O’Sullivan that the half-baked UK government plan to screen all newborns for hundreds of gene variants is dangerous, a waste of money and unscientific(12 July, p 21).
As well as being pointless from a clinical point of view, as with previous plans to put babies’ fingerprints or other biometrics into a central database, it is an irreversible invasion of the privacy of people who have no possible way of giving informed consent.
Another explanation for doomed early human clan
Your description of traces of an isolated population of early humans, never more than a few hundred individuals, has them “scattered over a distance of 1500 km” from Britain to Poland. This is more likely to point to a single, cohesive clan that, over centuries, migrated either east or west over this distance. Such a small, inbred population would have accumulated many genetic defects over time, making their extinction in the harsh glacial climate almost inevitable(5 July, p 30).
We must make Mars a plastic-free zone
The story on human habitations on Mars that could be built from bioplastics filled me with horror. We have already polluted our own planet with plastics to such an extent that they are found everywhere and in every species. We are now proposing to pollute another world. Not only that, but the algae we end up using to make the plastic would be bred to survive in Martian conditions. I foresee our descendants looking at Mars with telescopes and no longer observing a red planet, but a world of whatever colour the algae happens to be(12 July, p 14).
Who will take the blame if geoengineering goes awry? (1)
From
28 June, p 35
Who will take the blame if geoengineering goes awry? (2)
Geoengineering projects are nothing new: mining, coal, oil, etc. have impacts beyond borders and create mounting environmental problems. In the main, these industries are for profit and answer to shareholders. Because of the environmental damage they cause, we may need to consider geoengineering solutions that could have wider impacts too 鈥� possibly good, possibly bad. But who will run these projects? Who will take the profits? Who will take responsibility for unintended consequences?
My chat with AI showed it has a humorous side
Amid debate about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, I asked one about socks going missing in the washing machine. It gave me a reasonable and rational reply. I then asked if the issue could be related to an interaction of relativistic effects of the spinning and electromagnetic oddities of the washing machine. To my surprise, it not only knew I was making a joke, it also replied with humorous suggestions of its own. It then made a reference to the title of a non-existent orchestral piece by the composer Louis Spohr. The context clearly showed deliberate humour, not a hallucination, and the made-up title was actually rather clever(12 July, p 34).
That struck me as remarkable. If it had been a human, I would have willingly labelled that trivial chat as intelligent and witty. How then should I describe it when my conversation is with software?