Letters archive

It seems that conspiracy theories are very hard to counter, the problem being that it is difficult to change people's minds. A possible solution to this seemingly insoluble problem is to encourage them to change their own minds( 15 April, p 12 ). Asking "Is there any evidence that would cause you to change your …

I am often, and depressingly, amazed by a general lack of basic scientific or even factual knowledge among some people. Sometimes, I will ask others about the stars, for instance. All those tiny points of light in the night sky: what do you think they are? It is staggering how many people have no clue …

You note that the most effective method so far reported to counter conspiracy theories is a three-month course where people are taught how to think, not what to think. You have just described critical thinking, and the solution would seem to be teaching this to everyone from a very young age.

It was interesting to read David Robson's take on procrastination. Virtually everyone will have experienced trouble getting going with a project, task, report or piece of homework( 15 April, p 51 ). To explain this as a conditional and subliminal response to fear of failure is illustrative. While methods to mitigate this may include deconstructing …

The idea that a conscious being is needed to collapse the quantum wave function, which describes the probability that a particle will behave a certain way, has been abandoned by most physicists( 8 April, p 36 ). The main difficulty in building quantum computers is how to maintain the quantum state (another name for wave …

With reference to your feature on the extinction of microbes, one thing has increasingly concerned me. The fruit and vegetables I grow on my allotment decay very differently from the same varieties purchased at a supermarket( 15 April, p 46 ). Perhaps the time has come for serious research into whether the globalisation of food …

David Le Maistre suggests that his gas boiler has a lower carbon footprint than a heat pump. This isn't the case. As leading energy efficiency expert Jan Rosenow states : "A heat pump delivers about three units of heat for one unit of energy... A gas boiler delivers only about 0.9 units of heat for …

You report on an extremely powerful space explosion that may have broken our understanding of how similar explosions work. This event, called GRB221009A, was a gamma ray burst (GRB) and has been dubbed "the BOAT" – the brightest of all time( 8 April, p 19 ). Eric Burns at Louisiana State University and his colleagues …

Researchers aren't the first living beings to notice that an ultraviolet glow can betray the presence of small animals such as dormice – eagles can see in UV and are said to use this ability to hunt small mammals( 1 April, p 11 ).