Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editor

Bohr no boor As described in “When the atom went quantum,” (SN: 7/13/13, p. 20), Bohr’s willingness to travel both paths when different viewpoints seemed to clash, yet both seemed to fit the data, was crucial to the development of quantum mechanics. Yet that willingness cannot be equated with acceptance of all possible views. Having […]

Letters to the editor

Not-so-smart perception Researchers studying associations between IQ and selected visual tasks (“Less is more for smart perception,” SN: 6/29/13, p. 18) report that tracking small moving foreground objects, a task at which high-IQ subjects excelled, is often more important than detecting large-object motion or attending to background activity. They suggest that for driving or walking […]

Letters to the editor

European family ties are knotty I have trouble understanding “Europeans are one big family” (SN: 6/15/13, p. 8). It says that every person living in Europe today shares a common set of ancestors. First, what does “set” mean? “Set” implies there are certain common characteristics of the members, but people living in Europe 1,000 years […]

Letters to the editor

Letters to the editor

Invertebrate enigmas I found the recent article “Evolutionary enigmas” (SN: 5/18/13, p. 20) fascinating because I know of another example of an invertebrate animal possessing a “strictly vertebrate” quality. As a high school human anatomy and physiology teacher, I sometimes have my students test the effects of the constituents in cigarette smoke on live Daphnia […]

Letters to the editor

Wet Earth Erin Wayman’s article “Faint young sun” (SN: 5/4/13, p. 30), about how the early Earth stayed warm enough for liquid water, made me wonder about the effect of the temperature of the planet itself. A hotter core, thinner crust, more volcanism — wouldn’t those factors in addition to atmospheric influences affect surface temperature? […]

Letters to the editor

Fusion reactions It is not true that fusion packs the highest punch of any known energy-generating process (“Ignition failed,” SN: 4/20/13, p. 26). Matter-antimatter annihilation far exceeds it (Star Trek had it right back in the 1960s). I believe that under certain conditions, matter falling into a black hole can also yield more energy than […]

Letters to the editor

Ethics of humanized mice The recent stories “Human cells rev up mouse brains” (SN: 4/6/13, p. 16) and “Of mice and man” (SN: 3/23/13, p. 22) drove home to me that human-animal hybrids are now reality. In science fiction stories with such hybrids, a big part of the plot is the resultant ethical gray area: […]

Letters to the editor

Faux pas on fashion In “Students honored for research,” (SN: 4/6/13, p. 28), the female winner got singled out as “decked out in a lavender satin dress.” Didn’t Hillary Clinton recently point out to an interviewer that he asked her about her clothes, whereas he wouldn’t ask a man that? What are you trying to […]

Letters to the Editor

Pacing Alzheimer’s Science Stats “Alzheimer’s Advancing” (SN: 3/9/13, p. 4) reports a new analysis extrapolating from 2010 U.S. Census data that concludes Alzheimer’s disease will triple by 2050. Omitted in such an analysis is the accelerating advance of science and medicine over the next 40 years. The gloomy prediction makes little sense unless science stops […]