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While reading your article on the potentially unstable brain, I was reminded of a close parallel: controlling the Eurofighter Typhoon, a modern jet fighter. In essence, the plane is aerodynamically unstable and requires computer input to function. However, the gain is that the plane is more manoeuvrable and more agile. The key point is that …

While volcanic activity and related crop decline may have been a factor, multiple causes led to the French revolution, such as the high-spending habits of the French aristocracy and the cost of France's support for the American revolutionary war of 1775-83. This itself was the culmination of several years of repressive British taxation of American …

Regarding whether public transport will solve all our travel woes, there is a solution waiting in the wings, in the form of autonomous taxis. A driverless taxi that you hail through an app solves the disadvantages of public transport and might even be cheaper, once you account for the lack of personnel costs( Letters, 6 …

I totally disagree with Rosemary Sharples on the issue of public transport woes. I grew up in Hong Kong, where only about 10 per cent of the population own a car. I could certainly choose the route and time when travelling on public transport, except during the wee hours. Hong Kong has an excellent subway …

Having been a wearer of varifocal glasses for several years, I was heartened by the Taiwanese research using liquid crystals to dynamically switch between near and far visual modes( 13 September, p 15 ). The nice thing with conventional bi/varifocal glasses is that one quickly learns to make the necessary head movements to bring the …

The "ultrafinitists" who seek to abolish the use of infinity in mathematics reminded me of the influential Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer, renowned for proving Brouwer's fixed-point theorem. He went on to found an approach to mathematics that he called intuitionism, which included a rejection of the concept of actual infinity, though it admitted …

I like the sound of treatments where cancer cells are re-educated, so that they revert to behaving like normal cells. I wonder if it would be worth seeing whether a similar method could be used with malfunctioning connections between nerve cells, in the brains of people with Alzheimer's, to encourage them to be repaired( 30 …

As your dispatch rightly stated, chemically converting cancer cells to benign ones mimics the process of embryogenic differentiation in which myriad cell divisions, beginning with the fertilised egg, yield populations of newly specialised cells with curtailed growth rates. Those cells form our tissues and organs. This is, in fact, an "epigenetic" process in which external …

You report research that says smartphone use on the toilet may increase the risk of haemorrhoids by nearly 50 per cent. That leaves me to assume, or at least hope, that crosswords and printed magazines are more benign( 13 September, p 10 ).

With reference to your article "Smartphone use on the toilet may raise risk of haemorrhoids", I am left wondering whether reading the print version of Â鶹´«Ã½ on the toilet carries the same risk? Or is it only if I read it via the app on a smartphone? More research is required!

During the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by an average of up to 1.75°C, or 3.15°F ( 6 September, p 11 ). The term atrox is a Latin word meaning fierce ( 6 September, p 14 ).