Letters to the Editor

19231

Your article left me wondering. If the drug could help an allergic person eat up to 24 peanuts, it really isn’t a complete cure, is it? I guess I’ll just keep on avoiding all peanut products and their derivatives. Oh, well. Bob BeckettCollegedale, Tenn.

19230

I read this article with both amazement and bemusement. The technique you describe has been in practice for decades, but without a computer. Samuel T. Orton realized that dyslexics needed to be explicitly taught letter-sound relationships, a knowledge that most of us acquire automatically. I have been in private practice as an educational therapist for […]

19229

The hominid dating puzzle is continually being pieced together due to interdisciplinary work between anthropologists and geologists. I would note, however, that radiation decays (not accumulates) at a known rate in buried minerals, per the radiation half-life law. Bruce M. RuckerBerkeley, Calif.

19228

I object to the glib use of the phrase “time reversal” in this article. Time is a sequential history of events and is not reversible. What the researchers are accomplishing is a clever resequencing of events, roughly analogous to playing a strip of movie film backwards, an event that I’m sure you will agree occurs […]

19306

Your article ends with the claim that “a color-blind person and a noncarrier have no chance of having a color-blind child.” Yet as I recall from basic biology class, color blindness is considered a prime example of a sex-linked trait, which makes the above statement untrue. Carried on the X chromosome, the trait would manifest […]

19305

This article is somewhat misleading. We physicians long ago learned that blocking the enzymatic process (with Antibuse) helps alcoholics. The news is that increases in acetaldehyde in saliva have “possible local carcinogenic action.” Malcolm A. Sowers Castro Valley, Calif

19304

I was dismayed to see you publish an unsubstantiated and highly misleading claim that welfare “reform” is not harming children. The study dealt with the atypical welfare mothers able to find sustainable employment. For them, I don’t doubt that having enough money rather than too little would be an improvement. Unmentioned are the many unskilled […]

19303

You state in this article that in the last century, the average global temperature has risen about 0.6C. I suspect that most of the sensors in use today are not in the precise locations of thermometers 100 years ago. Also back then, there were wide areas of the globe that were probably not being monitored […]

19227

The July 22 cover, “Sticker shock,” and the related article say that the powerful forces that arise at the surface of micromachines weren’t expected. Any skilled machinist who has used Johannsen gauge blocks in measuring and checking his work would not be surprised at all. These blocks are stacks of hardened steel rectangles with highly […]

19302

I beg to differ with the quote, attributed to Ethan Temeles in this article: “This is the first really unambiguous example of ecology playing a role in the morphological differences between the sexes.” The statement exhibits the annoyingly common practice among zoologists to think and generalize as if only animals (and, even worse, only vertebrates) […]

19226

This article on waterproof coats was interesting, but the process used by the Turkish scientists would require evaporating the solvent. Should not possible harmful environmental side effects be considered before a new industrial process is created? Kenneth CrookSan Jose, Calif. I believe this same phenomenon occurs on the leaves of the common perennial lady’s mantle […]

19225

Your article on home-water disinfection in Africa reminds me of a water treatment method proposed a long time ago. It consisted of a long (200-foot), U-shape tube sunk in the ground as part of the water-delivery system. No organism could survive the pressure at the bottom of it. Lawrence EldenDearborn, Mich.