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Having recently left secondary school, I feel that Michael Reiss is right about the state of science in schools (1 December 2007, p 23) – but also that everyone who has commented so far has missed something: that the main problem in getting teens interested in science is health and safety. We are not allowed …

How do giant hailstones form (22 December 2007, p 48) ? Thunderstorm clouds – cumulonimbus – are not the only thing which might cause updraughts strong enough to support hailstones. Glider pilots will be familiar with lee waves, usually found downwind of hills, but which can be widespread if the right combination of stable and …

It was good to see a discussion of the problems of digital archiving and preservation (8 December 2007, p 28) . I work in the field of digital preservation, and these issues affect everyone, not only scientists accessing scientific data but also ordinary people accessing cultural repositories. Software presents immense difficulties for digital preservation, therefore …

I have news for your readers Peter Scott and John Osborn (22 December, p 34) . They are dead wrong. Scott assures us that belief is dangerous because once we accept an absurd idea, it then becomes that much easier to accept another and another. There is simply no scientific basis whatsoever for such an …

You are misled by the political rhetoric about free trade and protectionism when you discuss pressure on Africa to "open its markets" (15 December 2007, p 3) . Developed countries have always had protective tariffs and internal subsidies, and still do. In the EU and US the farm lobbies perpetuate enormous subsidies. It's the usual …

The last thing anyone concerned about health or the environment should do is install a domestic wood stove (17 November 2007, p 34) . Woodsmoke contains many similar chemicals to tobacco smoke and is associated with similar health problems – heart and lung diseases, mouth, throat and lung cancer, middle ear infections, cot deaths, genetic …

You reported the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's order that the Chalk River nuclear reactor be closed for maintenance (15 December 2007, p 5) , but forgot to mention that the prime minister Stephen Harper ignored it, insisting that the radioisotopes were more important than the safety of the nuclear plant. On top of ignoring the …

I wonder whether it is a coincidence that two consecutive articles on 15 December 2007 could hold the key to solving many more crimes in the UK. Indoor satnav (p 24) surely has the potential to make the UK government's identity card scheme redundant. Merely replace the chip proposed for identity cards with the Indoor …

I like the idea of using your cameraphone to translate menus in foreign countries (15 December 2007, p 21) . After all, once you know that you are being offered ladies' thighs, or ants climbing trees, or toad-in-the-hole, or lion's head hotpot, or cats' tongues, of course you know exactly what you will be eating!

• Though Pennsylvania has a history of iron mines, the iron that might be used to power fuel cells comes from coal mines' effluent (8 December 2007, p 27) . • Increases in school enrolment and attendance worldwide reduced the number of primary-school-age children out of school by around 20 per cent between 2002 and …

While it could be argued that the 2004 law introduced in Germany proved to be the tipping point for solar photovoltaic generation there (8 December 2007, p 34) , the development of feed-in tariff style policies has a deeper and much more nuanced history, stretching back at least to the US Public Utilities Regulatory Policies …

You propose that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should now rule on whether biofuels are good or bad for the planet ( 15 December 2007, p 3 and p 6 ). However commendable the IPCC's work has been in many other areas, we do not feel that its present structure ensures a sufficient breadth …

Although it is true that Srinivasa Ramanujan was largely self-taught and worked for a while as a poor clerk (15 December 2007, p 46) , this may give quite the wrong picture – of a 19th-century-style genius unrecognised by hostile society. Ramanujan had quite a good schooling and it was largely his own fault that …

Rowan Hooper reports that young chimps beat humans at a memory game involving remembering the location of numerals on a screen (8 December 2007, p 10) . Kate Douglas describes an experiment in which people are shown images with a subliminal message, and how subconscious processes filter what reaches awareness (1 December 2007, p 42) …