Letters to the Editor
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Letters
Shopping standards shift with age In “When good moods go decisively bad” (SN: 6/16/12, p. 10), researchers assume that their 70-year-old study participants would be as interested as their 20-something counterparts in finding up to 40 prices on 60 products in an Internet shopping exercise. When the septuagenarians fail to choose the cheapest product, the […]
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Letters
Redesigning flu mortality In “Designer flu” (SN: 6/2/12, p. 20), researcher Michael Osterholmis quoted as saying that even if the actual kill rate of H5N1 is 20 times lower than the current estimate of 59 percent, H5N1 would still have a mortality rate that “far exceeds” that of the 1918 flu. Wikipedia gives a 1918 […]
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Letters
Dark matter inspiration On reading Tom Siegfried’s editorial “Dark matter nothing to fear, if it’s there or not” (SN: 5/19/12, p. 2):As into the universe I did stare I met a particle that wasn’t there It wasn’t there again today Oh, I wish it would go away.Tom Derderian, Winthrop, Mass. Reality bits Regarding “Bits of […]
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Letters
Information as substrate In a recent article (“Enriched with information,” SN: 3/10/12, p. 22), you point out that some researchers consider consciousness to be a form of information. In another (“Bits of reality,” SN: 4/7/12, p. 26), you mention that increasing numbers of physicists are coming to regard information as the basic “stuff” from which […]
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Letters
Visions spark debate In “Visions for all” (SN: 4/7/12, p. 22), researchers found that functioning people who “hallucinated” God were high on the “absorption” scale and that 4 percent of people studied reported hallucinations. This reminded me that 4 percent of the population is grade V hypnotizable. All of these superhypnotizable people rate very high […]
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Letters
Happy 90th, Science News My father has generously given a subscription of Science News to me since I was small. In the ’60s I received a package in the mail each month containing science experiment materials and directions. So cool! We celebrated Dad’s 90th birthday in April. He was an aeronautic engineer; I’m an architect. […]
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Letters
Consciousness series pondered Hofstadter’s “strange loop” and other ideas presented in the article “Self as symbol” (SN: 2/11/12, p. 28) suggest, but never say, that the notion of “I” exists in the dimension of time, not space. Obviously then, consciousness is not a tangible object — not any part of the brain. Rather, the “I” […]
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Letters
A Boy Scout’s salute I am a Boy Scout doing the Communications Merit Badge. I am supposed to write to the editor of a magazine and express my opinion. I’ve always loved the Atom & Cosmos section because I’m very interested in particle physics and on the other end of the scale, cosmology. “Earth-y orb […]
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Letters
Pondering speedy neutrinos Regarding “Hints of a flaw in special relativity” (SN: 10/22/11, p. 18), there could be a simple explanation for neutrinos being measured as traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. While a vacuum is typically defined as a space entirely devoid of matter, in fact a vacuum is a […]
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Letters
Sinking heavy ice The picture in “From the Archive” (“Self-experimenter didn’t suffer,” SN: 1/28/12, p. 32) shows heavy water ice sinking in a glass of water while alongside, light water ice floats. What is not clear is what kind of water is in the glasses. If heavy water ice were in a glass of heavy […]
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Letters
Connecting the lincs As a physician, I was absolutely astounded reading “Missing lincs” (SN: 12/17/11, p. 22) and still am. We have been waiting since DNA was discovered to find this ‘what makes us human’ aspect of our biochemistry. Even in the infancy of this research, we are discovering the chemical reasons for a type […]
