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Dan Jones discusses the origins of bipedalism, but makes no mention of the possibility that our ape ancestors may have developed in an area that was flooded, either part of the year or all the time – such as the edge of a mangrove swamp (8 March, p 36) . I have seen videos of …

Feedback doubts that Norfolk Island is a nation state (29 March) . But it is, you know. It has its own flag (a Norfolk Island pine), its own national anthem ( God Save the Queen ), a roaring duty-free export trade and tourist trade, no taxes and a population of about 1500. The island was …

As an engineer, I could not help but put together key elements from two articles, namely "Thought Control" (1 March, p 44) and "Sleep Tight" (15 March, p 30) . The former outlines the amazing work done in identifying the molecules responsible for controlling the formation of brain neuron connections and those responsible for tagging …

I look intently at the pictorial representations of black holes that appear regularly in Â鶹´«Ã½ and wonder: with all that light-bending going on, it seems strange that none of the bent light obscures the black hole's event horizon and disc from external observers. I would expect intuitively that one would see a smudge or …

You mention the Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment, a group funded by the tobacco industry that attacks health "puritanism" (16 February, p 11) . Was this a case of acronymal nominative determinism?

• An editing error had us stating that the monks at Canterbury cathedral who made one of the first sightings of transient lunar phenomena did so in the 10th century (28 March, p 41) ; in fact it was in 1178, which was, of course, in the 12th century.

While traffic noise may reduce the morning chorus in some areas I suggest that the main cause is the decline in common birds (29 March, p 35) . We moved into our quiet Suffolk village in 1975. The chorus then was sufficiently loud for one frequent visitor to keep her bedroom window shut and the …

Jason Palmer reports that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) may in fact interact, annihilating one another and releasing gamma radiation (15 March, p 10) . If so, this would presumably cause the universe's mass to slowly decrease, so reducing the gravitational drag on its expansion. What's more, the masses of the postulated WIMPs are supposed …

Stephen Kirby suggests monkeys may prefer silence to any music at all so that they can listen for danger (15 March, p 22) . This poses the further question: why do humans like noise so much? Children playing can sustain their shouting and screaming for long periods. Adults generate hours of noise in football crowds …

I always enjoy Feedback taking the mickey at the expense of foggy thinking. But you refer to the difficulty of visualising nine-dimensional spaces occasioned by measurements in "cubic litres" (15 March) . This implies the cubing of a cube – and, no matter how hard I try, the cube of 3 will not come out …

Your editorial suggests that it may be time to thank animal technicians in published papers for the indispensable role they play (29 March, p 5) . Perhaps it is also time to assess the usefulness of animal research, to see whether causing so much grief to technicians, as well as to the majority of the …

We are told that rogue "bubble" universes could blow us all up (29 March, p 11) . There is a more interesting scenario. Suppose that after any big bang it takes 13.7 billion years before an intelligence develops sufficiently to investigate what happened at its particular big bang, and this intelligence then tries to simulate …

Michael Erard's article on English missed some important points (29 March, p 28) . English changed far more between the times of Chaucer and Shakespeare than between Shakespeare's and our own. That's why Chaucer needs to be "translated" but many people can read Shakespeare. It is hard for a language to break up into dialects …

Assuming that the proponents of carbon sequestration are honest and serious, Fred Pearce's analysis of the pointlessness of their endeavours should go a long way towards convincing them that they are on the wrong track (29 March, p 36) . As they all have impeccable credentials in business, politics and even science, I wouldn't dream …