Fried mushrooms
Your article on the evolution of warm-bloodedness as a means to avoid fungal infection ends with speculation that global warming might drive the evolution of more warm-tolerant fungi, and lead to a raised risk of fungal pathogens in both mammals and birds (3 December, p 50).
This ignores what the rest of the article says. Fungi have had a tempting, warm environment to adapt to for hundreds of millions of years – the insides of mammals and birds – and they have not been able to do it. This suggests a more basic limitation in the biology of fungi that stops their adaptation. Increasing the number of warm places for fungi to grow is unlikely to overcome this limitation, whatever it is.
Bright idea
James Mitchell Crow’s article about thermoelectric solar panels mentioned that photovoltaic (PV) materials respond to only a narrow spectrum of frequencies, the remainder being either too feeble to trigger the photoelectric effect or too energetic and a hindrance (26 November, p 38).
Might the yield be improved by using a trick similar to that in fluorescent lighting, where ultraviolet light is converted to visible light? The conventional solar panel could be coated with a material that absorbs a wide spectrum and fluoresces at the optimal frequency for the PV material, thus harvesting more of the available energy and avoiding the disruption caused by high-energy photons. If a coating is not feasible, perhaps a reflector to direct light towards the panel could work.
Yawns all round
Jan Chamier writes that her cat yawns when she or her husband does, and speculates that this is an example of contagious yawning in the animal realm (26 November, p 32). I have a better example. As I was reading her letter, I started yawning as soon as I read the word “yawn” – contagious yawning from reading about the contagious yawning of a cat. Even now, I am yawning as I write this letter.
Climate blame
Maybe popular TV documentaries highlighting life in the polar regions and the impact that global warming will have on the area will initiate what your story called the “climate blame game” (12 November, p 6).
However, from now on legal negligence could be determined simply by looking at the risk assessment, or the lack of one, drawn up when the carbon was released. My paper , considers the UK Engineering Council’s advice to assess the risks to distant people from emissions for all projects.
From a limited survey of engineering opinions, my paper suggests that the hazards to life and the probabilities of these hazards occurring are both orders of magnitude worse than normal civilian dangers. Action or mitigation is therefore essential. There could be rich pickings for the lawyers.
Heads in the cloud
It is good to see that biologists are beginning to recognise that, as there is more to the nervous system than just what’s in your head, the rest of the body has a contribution to make to mental responses (15 October, p 34). How long before we appreciate the importance of the networks of brains in interactive societies? It is tempting to suggest that cultural activities are the outward manifestations of “cloud” thinking.
Shells cracked
Whether or not biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was partial to pasta is doubtless lost to posterity, but he did take a great interest in foraminifera. In his classic work, On Growth and Form (1917), he devotes a whole chapter, “The Spiral Shells of the Foraminifera”, to the sort of analysis which Tom Radford calls for in his letter on the mathematics of pasta (12 November, p 36).
Thompson had no access to computer graphics, but he made reference to experiments which showed that many of the forms found among the foraminifera could be generated by using mercury and chromic acid. Computer models are perhaps safer and less messy.
Seeing the light
Elena Oancea at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues have shown a link between skin and the light-sensitive chemical rhodopsin, which is also found in the retina (12 November, p 20).
If we don’t get enough sun on our skin during the winter months, could this contribute to making us seasonally depressed?
The editor writes:
• The researchers say there is no evidence that rhodopsin expression in skin can be linked to any kind of depression, so perhaps best to wrap up warm instead.
Net gain
So the fish stocks in the Canadian Grand Banks are finally recovering (30 July, p 5). A smart fisheries department would now put half the area out of bounds, permanently.
Imagine getting the fish stocks back, not to what they were in 1930, but to what they were when the Portuguese first arrived in the area. Fishing would be so good that there would be no need for bottom trawls or drift nets. Simple hook and line would yield fantastic catches, and there probably would not be any need for quotas. One regulation would suffice: sink any boat found fishing in the no-go area.
Man strokes fish
Your report that fish find massage soothing comes as no surprise to scuba divers (19 November, p 7). Several species seem to find divers interesting, and will often hang around to be scratched and patted. Groupers, in particular, like to have their bellies rubbed.
Recently, diving off Little Cayman, I met a grouper about 10 metres down which swam below me for 20 minutes. I could put my hands around it and squeeze. The fish would shimmy out ahead, then come back into position for another treatment. Personally, I could no more eat a grouper than I could a cocker spaniel.
Doubly infinite?
So our universe is one of 10500 universes in a multiverse (26 November, p 42). But what lies beyond the multiverse? Is it just one of 10500 multiverses in a polyverse? Maybe it’s a reversal of the idea from mathematician Augustus De Morgan’s poem: “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”
The editor writes:
• The suggestion is that the multiverse is everything.
From Brian Horton
Those who are convinced that the multiverse explains everything should read The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close, which Amanda Gefter reviewed (29 October, p 54) and which describes how quantum field theory appeared to require electrons with infinite mass and charge. The infinities disappeared with further development of these theories. No doubt the infinite number of universes will also disappear with a little more thought.
West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
From Phil Carter
If the multiverse contains all possible versions of reality, could we not be living in one of the universes where the inhabitants are destined never quite to make sense of physics?
Lichfield, Staffordshire, UK
God of many things
Your article about the workings of the human mind being more akin to quantum, rather than logical, computation echoes the juxtaposition of eastern and western schools of thought (3 September, p 34).
The ways of the west have their roots in rigid, solid, geometric forms, medieval scholars seeing these harmonic principles as the divine path to God.
The ways of the east could be seen as possessing a quantum element. For example, in Hinduism, the god Brahman was a multifaceted being whose existence simultaneously spanned multiple geo-temporal locations, a feat that quantum science is no stranger to.
Nothing's up
I thought physicists had given up hope when I read “Why nothing matters” in the online version of the editorial to your special issue covering zero, the empty set, electron hole theory, the vacuum and noble gases (newscientist.com/article/mg21228391.300).
It soon became clear though. What physicists need to do is to work on a TON – a Theory Of Nothing.
Golden stick
So ravens pick up sticks in their beaks and wave them about to attract a partner, and develop complex individual vocalisations, behaviours that could be deliberate and intelligent, or simply down to hormonal triggers (3 December, p 16).
I pick up my gold-plated saxophone, stick it in my mouth and wave it about, which is how I met my partner. I, too, have developed a complex set of quasi-vocalisations: the sax approximates more closely to the modulations and overtones in the human voice than any other instrument.
“Are the ravens doing the same as us?” is as unanswerable as “Are we doing the same as the ravens?”
For the record
• In the feature “Friend or foe?” (3 December, p 46), the salt content of a small pot of yogurt should have been given as 0.4 grams.
• The story on the discovery of exoplanet Kepler-22b (10 December, p 4) should have said that if it is at the lighter end of the possible mass range for a planet 2.4 times as wide as Earth, it might be gassy like Neptune, and if at the heavier end, it might be rocky.