Letters archive

Danielle Olsen is absolutely right in advocating that the arts should go hand in hand with science. The popular and much misguided tendency is to see the two as mutually exclusive, with the arts often dismissed as a mere frivolity( 7 January, p 21 ). While the arts may provide a different type of stimulus …

Abigail Beall rightly questions what we are trying to say to aliens, either via radio signals or with artefacts on space probes( 17/24 December 2022, p 64, p 66 ). Meanwhile, at the end of Becca Caddy's interesting article on digital storage, she mentions using lasers to encode data into silica glass by creating data-dense …

You report a plan to produce environmentally friendly food from bacteria using only green hydrogen, carbon dioxide and ammonia. The ammonia in this recipe will almost certainly be produced by means of the Haber-Bosch process, which is a major source of CO 2 emissions( 31 December 2022, p 16 ). The odd thing is that …

When it comes to the efficacy – or not – of melatonin for sleep, one group that got no mention is totally blind people( 31 December 2022, p 41 ). Random trials are hard to come by, as we are such a small group, but I know several blind people who say that melatonin makes …

If aliens are flying Jupiter-mass spacecraft around the galaxy, surely we are more likely to detect the effects of the drive required to accelerate and decelerate such a large mass – which is likely to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light – rather than the minuscule ripples in space-time generated by …

You report that the use of sonification in astronomy to turn data into audio has led to surprising discoveries. Surely other scientific fields with vast quantities of data to be analysed, sometimes urgently, could benefit from the use of sonification( 31 December 2022, p 46 ). Areas that jump to my mind are volcanology, MRI …

Annalee Newitz's new novel, The Terraformers , reviewed by Sally Adee, raises the issue of how we assign the quality of personhood to non-humans( 7 January, p 30 ). Pet owners and animal lovers know that animals have personalities. I scatter birdseed each morning and enjoy seeing the doves and pigeons take it. There is …

You pondered solutions to save the world, including building a sunshade in space to confront global warming. I have another geoengineering idea. A canal dug between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea would provide central Asian countries with access to global shipping and increase precipitation in the region. The extra rain would enable carbon-sequestering …