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You warn that "the world is running out of plutonium" (12 July, p 36) , but NASA's James Green need look no further for new supplies. We have plenty in the UK, as you reported under the headline "Radioactive cache grows" (same issue, p 7) . From Brian Whittaker This somewhat comical juxtaposition arises from …

Lawrence Krauss would love the issue of religion to be simpler than it is, and selects his Einstein accordingly (5 July, p 50) . By leaping on Einstein's use of the words "childish" and "primitive" to describe the Bible, he does not simplify matters, but muddies the waters. Scientific advances have indeed given humanity enormous …

A. C. Grayling perpetuates the myth that astronomers were burned at the stake by the Catholic church (28 June, p 54) . No natural philosopher, as they were then known, was ever burned by the church because they practised what we now call science. That said, this cannot excuse the brutal punishment some received for …

Narcissists are not interested enough in others to try to understand them, or even to care about meeting their needs. They learn just enough to enable the manipulation of others to meet their own needs. This works only in the short term as most people eventually realise that they're being used and that their deeper …

The interesting thing about Einstein's take on god and religion is not that he considered god to be non-personal, but that he recognised the vast and intense intelligence inherent in the universe (5 July, p 50) . Perhaps in the first half of the 20th century it was easier to think of personhood as a …

I am continually baffled by the enthusiasm for using agricultural "waste" to produce cellulosic ethanol (21 June, p 30) . I fail to see any material difference between that and the use of food crops for the production of ethanol. Directly diverting food to fuel production increases not only the cost of food but also …

You reported Michael Prather expressing concerns about nitrogen trifluoride as "the missing greenhouse gas" (5 July, p 10) . Air Products believes the basic premise of Prather and his co-author Juno Hsu – that 100 per cent of the annual global production of NF 3 could be released into the atmosphere – is an inaccurate …

"Nature is finished" ( 5 July, cover and p 32 )? Oh please. Nature is just fine, and is busy doing what it always does when faced with environmental challenges. Some species are becoming extinct, some are adapting and evolving, some ecosystems are disappearing, and new ones are taking their place. Granted, humans may be …

You extol the virtues of electric cars without asking where the electricity they need will come from (28 June, p 5) . It is highly unlikely that this electricity will have zero carbon cost, not to mention the additional environmental cost embodied in the manufacture of and infrastructure for these cars. People should not be …

Be it ever so small, it is a disappointment to see anything resembling support for the nonsense preached by the Japanese government over its whaling – such as your soundbite of the Japanese delegate to the International Whaling Commission saying: "This is a case of accepting the coexistence of different cultures," (28 June, p 12) …