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IT HAS been a tough two years for the UK's biotech sector. After a period of digging deep into its reserves of stamina and nerve, will a stronger, fitter industry emerge ready to take on the increasingly fierce global competition? The race to develop new drugs continues to hot up. The goal is a new …

Spam now occupies 80 per cent of my incoming email traffic, clogging up my telephone lines, my ISP and the internet (7 February, p 26) . Friends report being invaded by ever-increasing numbers of promises of fatter lips, longer penises, larger breasts, other odd products, loans and money-making offers. Yet nobody ever admits to buying …

James Randerson's article about remote immobilisers for foiling car thieves missed the obvious solution (21 February, p 24) . All modern cars have a computer-controlled rev limiter that changes the ignition mapping when the engine revs get too high. All that has to be done is to add a control that will limit power and …

This concept has been tried and tested in Melbourne during a vehicle theft, without any problems. All that was required was communication between the police and the security company to guarantee the car was stopped in a safe place.

I was intrigued by the article about how people lie more in phone conversations than in emails (14 February, p 23) as I have found a similar difference between phones and email in my business. I am a prostitute, and to get clients I advertise in the local newspaper. Normal practice is to provide a …

I was interested to read your article (21 February, p 23) about a machine to produce hydrogen from alcohol and water, to power eco-friendly bus services. While on holiday in Tenerife, I read the following in the English language magazine Canary Island Connections: "Spain intends to destroy 7.6 million hectolitres of wine produced in the …

Your article on the warrah (20 December, p 80) mentioned a theory that it may have been carried from South America, but "unfortunately, there is no evidence that people…even visited the Falklands before the English." I have come across an intriguing alternative theory as to how such a large predator may have got to the …

• In the article "'Scientists not to blame' for arsenic error" (28 February, p 4) , we reported the British High Court's dismissal of legal claims brought by Bangledeshi villagers against the British Geological Survey. The article stated that the BGS and its scientists made mistakes in their 1992 report which delayed the discovery of …

The example of neem that is mentioned in your item on patenting native medicines poses some interesting wider dilemmas (28 February, p 15) . While it is true that the pesticidal effects of neem oil have been exploited in India and elsewhere for perhaps 2000 years, the discovery of the active ingredients, especially azadirachtin, is …

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) or co-generation is efficient (14 February, p 24) , but only if the heat generated reduces total fuel consumption. However, if one extends the periods when domestic hot water is available to generate electricity, the efficiency falls dramatically. After a decade of CHP sales to commercial users the medium-scale market …

In his article on the benefits of aspirin (7 February, p 36) , Gareth Morgan makes a plausible case for considering salicylate as a micronutrient with vitamin status, and therefore as an essential component of diet. On existing evidence, however, it is hard to imagine how micro amounts of salicylate could be of any therapeutic …

Morgan gives the standard account of the anti-inflammatory properties of aspirin and salicylate through acetylation of the enzymes COX-1 and COX-2. This may conceivably explain the action of aspirin but cannot explain the action of its metabolite, salicylate, which is formed soon after aspirin is absorbed into the body, and which exhibits anti-inflammatory properties of …

The article on chips ending Microsoft's security problems fails to explain what is new (21 February, p 21) . How do the new developments differ from the features in the Intel 386 processor with which all current PC processors are backward-compatible? That processor could mark memory segments as executable (that is, as code) and writeable …