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You quote Bern psychiatrist Daniela Hubl saying that a case of hers "proves that the voices were generated in the language areas of the patient's own brain" (18 August, p 16) . And here we dumb members of the lay public were thinking the voices really did come from one of Satan's imps, the bedstead, …

• An editing error had us introducing beavers to Banff, which is in Aberdeenshire, when they are in fact being reintroduced to Bamff, Perthshire (25 August, p 42) . • We said that of surviving gorillas, "roughly half are in the Virunga mountains and the rest of Uganda" (25 August, p 5) . That should …

It was certainly unfair of Linnaeus to insult his erstwhile colleague Daniel Rolander by naming an insect Aphanus rolandri – Aphanus being Greek for ignoble and obscure (4 August, p 41) . Unfortunately, you refer to it as a beetle. The insect in question is a heteropterous bug belonging to the Pyrrhocoridae .

In your report on artificial fingers you say "the software gauges how much downwards force the material absorbs by comparing the force applied by the finger with the force felt by the platform. Softer materials absorb more force" (4 August, p 23) . Perhaps you would like to explain how this is consistent with Newton's …

Lawrence Krauss raises the issue of the scarlet A for atheists (25 August, p 21) . I agree that there are several reasons why it doesn't make a good symbol: not only is it ambiguous, but the specificity of its colour and typography make it difficult to execute in vernacular media. On my blog, Effing …

Your interview with Andrew Wadge, chief scientist of the UK Food Standards Agency, contrasts an example of the laudable "traffic lights" food labelling scheme proposed by the FSA with the labelling scheme adopted by Tesco supermarket in the case of its 400-gram cheese and bacon quiche (1 September, p 56) . The Tesco example shown …

You write "Rebecca Goldstein has received numerous awards for fiction and scholarship" (25 August, p 46) Here is one more: the Blind Spot Award. In her entire article on science in fiction she never once mentions science fiction. Perhaps she feels that "literary fiction" is what she writes. I guess we science fiction writers just …

Before evaluating the havoc wrought on cosmology by the observational clout of spontaneously emerging "Boltzmann brains", perhaps one ought to evaluate the quality of such brains (18 August, p 26) . Human brains have been selected through Darwinian processes to observe the universe consistently and usefully – and so, presumably, have alien brains. Not so …

There was logic in Sadie Williams's comment that energy conservation may not reduce carbon dioxide emissions (18 August, p 18) . It is true that funds saved through saving energy will be put to new uses, but this is a problem only if the energy expended on those new uses is powered by fossil fuels. …

Correspondents looking askance at Paul Davies's proposal of flexi-laws of physics (30 June, p 30) perhaps find it unsettling to consider that the objective reality of physical laws is not in their "are", but in their "would be". Thinking about the reality of physical laws as processes rather than products is another way of grasping …

It is certainly time to bring discussion of population growth out of the shadows, as William Laurance does (1 September, p 23) . He says that educating women is the single most important action needed. We would argue that, while education is absolutely critical, it needs to go hand in hand with the provision of …

You report the findings of a paper presented at the American Chemical Society meeting, in which researchers at Rutgers University claim that fizzy drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) have raised levels of carbonyl compounds that have been blamed for causing diabetic complications (1 September, p 7) . These findings appear to diverge from …

Bob Holmes writes that a long period of coexistence "would certainly rule out the simplest scenario – that Homo habilis gradually evolved into Homo erectus " (11 August, p 12) . Can he cite a single example, from any era, of one species evolving en bloc into another? This could only happen in a Lamarckian …

Richard Lovett's article perpetuates myths about the effects of breakfast on brain function (18 August, p 30) . Skeletal muscle (almost half of your total body mass) stores glycogen and takes up glucose from the blood to replenish those stores, which must be available as an instant energy source for fight or flight. This occurs …

I wonder why you considered it news that there was a USB turntable being released that will enable you to turn records into MP3 files (4 August, p 23) . I already own one, the Numark TT USB. According to Amazon.com, it has been available since 2001. There are at least three other makes that …

Any "Boltzmann brain" is likely to be suicidally depressed, popping into existence billions of light years from anything else (18 August, p 26) . The odds on finding another intelligence nearby are mind-bogglingly minuscule: our "brain" is much more likely to encounter Boltzmann toasters, Boltzmann Elvis detectors or, if really lucky, a Boltzmann Shakespeare sonnet. …