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You report on the idea of making households pay for the rubbish they throw away, as a means to decrease pressure on landfill and increase recycling, without much hope of any such scheme being implemented in the near future in the UK ( 25 September, p 18 ). Switzerland has had this for decades, based …

Marta Zaraska made important points about food waste , especially from restaurants and other food outlets. One factor in this are the UK and EU bans on the use of this waste as pigswill ( 25 September, p 42 ). Pigs, and chickens and rabbits during the second world war in the UK, have always …

For the past two years, I have been putting all my food purchases onto a spreadsheet, detailing the quantity and use-by or best-before dates. Since I began, I have only wasted two items. I review the list daily and make my menu for the following day from it.

Ken Jensen's timely warning that heat pumps can operate on a cooling cycle in the summer should ring very loud alarm bells ( Letters, 2 October ). Unless this feature is disabled by legislation, as the UK government seeks to roll out this type of system, it is just another way to accelerate the apocalypse …

Yes, there is a need to maintain the ability to perform anonymous transactions in a free society ( 18 September, p 16 ). However, the news that the El Salvador government is accepting bitcoin – billed as anonymous – as tender is disturbing. Proof-of-work blockchain currencies like bitcoin are a bad idea because of their …

You report that hyenas make a face when they want to play-fight ( 2 October, p 23 ). Cats also make play faces. Our 11-year-old arches her whiskers forward and opens her mouth slightly when playing. Her expression when hunting or fighting is very different – the play face can't be mistaken. I have had …

I have sympathy with the view that women don't feature significantly in the first book of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series ( 2 October, p 32 ). I would, however, point out that in subsequent parts of the trilogy, we do see three significant and strong women: Bayta Darell, Arkady Darell and Lady Callia. Perhaps Asimov …

Grace Maddrell, author of Tomorrow Is Too Late , uses they/them pronouns ( 2 October, p 33 ). A quote in our feature on AI ( 9 October, p 36 ) was partially attributed. It was made by Ellie Pavlick at Brown University in Rhode Island and Google AI.

The question of scale as it pertains to the ability of a computer to become self-aware, a possible precondition of artificial general intelligence, has been explored at least as far back as 1966. In his book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , Robert Heinlein described the human brain as having 10 10 neurons (actually, …

Is the result of GPT-3 so surprising? Intelligence is an emergent property, so increasing the number of network parameters is almost certainly bound to increase intelligence. A key next step, already hinted at by science fiction authors, is to give neural networks vision and hearing senses. I suspect that the results will be even more …