Letters to the Editor

18970

“Vaccine verity” describes several parents who refuse to get their children vaccinated, citing rumors. These people are gambling in a casino they don’t understand. Since the risk of their child developing a serious disease is still low, they will no doubt say, “See, vaccination isn’t necessary.” But parents who bet against vaccines and lost might […]

18964

Although the physiological basis and purpose of dreams may be uncertain, we need to recall that Freud was more interested in what his patients said about their dreams than in the dream content itself. Humans are inveterate interpreters. We are constantly reading our surroundings, our inner states, even our pasts and futures. Those interpretations often […]

18963

I was distressed to read that Science News thinks there are no steroid hormone receptors in insects. Granted, their reproduction is not regulated by steroids, but ecdysone, the molting hormone, is certainly a steroid. There is some evidence that juvenile hormone, the hormone that regulates development and sometimes reproduction, acts through a steroidlike-receptor pathway. Other […]

18939

I am writing in response to an article in the July 28 issue, “Having gathered moss, water drops roll.” You should have taken the time to find out that Lycopodium is not a moss. It’s true that a common name for the plant is club moss, but Lycopodium is in the division Lycophyta, sometimes called […]

18938

In grad school, I read and learned from Ernst Mayr’s Populations, Species, and Evolution (1963, 1970, Harvard University Press). I think that “Alarming butterflies and go-getter fish” extremely simplifies Mayr’s position on speciation. The article says that Mayr focuses solely on geographic separation, “allopathic speciation.” This ignores the fact that Mayr discussed a variety of […]

18937

Your story on trace amines in the brain neglected to mention the most interesting and well-studied of these, the powerful endogenous hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). DMTs role in endogenous psychosis was studied intensively in the 1960s, before research with these drugs became so controversial. We recently subjected DMT to intensive study in a group of normal […]

18936

I am grateful to Science News for having achieved with your words what no doctor has managed in the past 20 years: cured my diabetes. I now find that my average blood sugar falls safely within the range 80 to 240 milligrams per deciliter cited in the article as normal. On the strength of this […]

18960

This concerns the story discussing the ability of flowers to protect their reproductive parts by closing up during a rain storm. I recently observed what may be other mechanisms to achieve the same end in flowers that can’t close up. As a storm approaches, Queen Anne’s lace dips its flat umbels to a vertical position […]

18959

It may help to understand where that “missing antimatter” is if we just look around us. A proton has a positive charge–the sum of the quark polarities. If the (negative) electrical charge resident on the proton is in a reverse-time continuum, we would see it as positive. The mass remains the same. Hence, we have […]

18958

The study in “Marijuana may boost heart attack risk” appears to be more about the effects of smoking and deep inhalation than a useful examination of the effects of tetrahydrocannabinol, which is what marijuana smokers seek. The report makes it sound as though this active ingredient is the cause of the marginal increase in heart […]

18957

The article says, “Logging and burning for agriculture currently claim about 1 percent of the Amazon rain forest per year.” This simply is not true. We have been hearing this and even more alarming “statistics” about Amazon deforestation for more than 20 years. Yet NASA Landsat images show that little more than 10 percent of […]

18956

Both smokers and nonsmokers should appreciate results of studies of the effect of organic selenium on angiogenesis. A report last year by Cheng Jiang et al. in Molecular Carcinogenesis (vol. 29, issue 4) reports sustained suppression of angiogenesis in breast and prostate cancer cells. However, inorganic selenium supplements induce less favorable effects. Millard M. Mershon […]