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Letters archive

Join the conversation in Âé¶¹´«Ã½'s Letters section, where readers can share their thoughts and opinions on articles and see responses from experts and enthusiasts across a range of science topics. To submit a letter, please see our terms and email letters@newscientist.com


13 April 2022

A site for UK nuclear waste? I pick London

From David Wheeler, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK

Further to your look at the rising cost of a proposed underground deposit for nuclear waste in the UK, the site remains undecided ( 5 March, p 19 ). Nuclear waste needs to be buried in a rock that is impermeable, flexible (so it won't form fissures through which material can leak), of reasonable depth …

13 April 2022

A world without rabbits would be just fine by me

From Tony Power, Sydney, Australia

I disagree with Graham Lawton, rabbits should be eradicated ( 19 March, p 43 ). If places outside Australia and New Zealand want to have limited populations of these pests, that would be their choice.

20 April 2022

Is this why bioscience has a replication issue?

From Dave Smith,Alnwick, Northumberland, UK

While the points made in "Failure to replicate" are all reasonable, there is a potentially valuable explanation for seemingly unreproducible experiments: an additional factor that hasn't been controlled for ( 9 April, p 45 ). For example, when researchers were faced with different results from genetically identical mice obtained from different suppliers, patient detective work …

20 April 2022

Soil has huge potential to help us tame climate crisis

From Cheryl Hillier, Lampeter, Ceredigion, UK

When it comes to ways to avert a climate crisis, we rarely hear about the capability of soils to sequester carbon, which far outstrips any technological "fixes" that are still largely hypothetical to date in terms of cost, feasibility, speed, simplicity and scale ( 9 April, p 8 ). It seems that a global increase …

20 April 2022

On the pros and cons of a zero-covid approach (1)

From Peter Sutton,Guildford, Surrey, UK

I agree with much of the logic in Michael Marshall's appraisal of zero-covid policies ( 2 April, p 27 ). With no vaccines, governments and health bodies were right to attempt to limit covid-19 in 2020. However, it isn't clear how long one needs to persist with a zero-covid strategy – three months, 30 months, …

20 April 2022

On the pros and cons of a zero-covid approach (2)

From Tom Jones, St Austell, Cornwall, UK

You compare New Zealand and Vietnam with the UK. However, the UK has a huge proportion of non-UK citizens who want to be able to visit or be visited by relatives living abroad. Also, a large proportion of the UK population is abroad at any given time. They would be stuck there if there was …

20 April 2022

Let's not get bogged down in consciousness problem (1)

From John Cantellow, Derby, UK

"Trying to reformulate physics to include subjective experience as a physical constituent of the world", as the article by Thomas Lewton puts it, seems unlikely to succeed ( 2 April, p 38 ). If we were to look inside our heads while enjoying our rich, subjective experience, we would see none of it. It doesn't …

20 April 2022

Let's not get bogged down in consciousness problem (2)

From Lawrence R. Bernstein, Menlo Park, California, US

Proposed connections between consciousness and quantum physics seem based on little more than both appearing mysterious, hard to fathom and a bit spooky. Imaginative humans can project consciousness into disembodied spirits, trees, rocks, quarks and the big bang, but there is no evidence for it originating or extending anywhere outside of a brain.

20 April 2022

Earlier work paid tribute to science beyond Europe

From Dave Holtum, Bathampton, Somerset, UK

James Poskett says that the debt owed by science to non-European scientists of yesteryear has been largely ignored until the past decade ( 26 March, p 27 ). However, The Cambridge Illustrated History of the World's Science, published some 40 years ago, devotes about half of its pages to Greek, Arabian, Hindu and Chinese science …

20 April 2022

For the record

Satellites reveal information on Earth's magnetic field more than 3000 kilometres below our feet ( 26 March, p 12 ). The image in our article on resurrecting extinct species was actually of Lumut Port in Malaysia ( 19 March, p 23 ).

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