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You ask whether it is "dewy-eyed idealism" to imagine international research institutions dedicated to climate change, modelled on CERN ( Leader, 23 November ). It would indeed be dewy-eyed to suggest that scientists are inherently more tolerant and cooperative than anyone else. Accelerators large enough to push the frontiers of physics are fantastically expensive. Particle …

Abigail Beall offers tips for observing meteor showers ( 16 November, p 51 ). I would like to share an alternative way to see them that works when it is cloudy and even in daylight. There is a very powerful space surveillance radar station in France called GRAVES . When a meteor burns up, the …

Donna Lu describes an artificial intelligence system that can detect problems in electrocardiograms and predict early death ( 16 November, p 19 ). The system can do this despite there being no clues in the data that cardiologists can pick up on. This situation highlights a major problem with deep-learning neural net systems. They may …

A reflex will pull your hand away from a flame. It is our ability to know this has happened that means we know we are conscious. When an artificial intelligence system makes a prediction that someone will die in the next 12 months, but neither it nor its programmers knows how it has come to …

The use of mosquito nets for fishing can have destructive consequences for food security and coastal ecosystems by the removal of juvenile fish, as Brian Owens reports ( 16 November, p 9 ). The pyrethroid insecticides that are often used to treat the nets pose a further threat. They are highly toxic to aquatic insects, …

Your review of the exhibition Flop: 13 stories of failure reminded me of finding Stephen Pile's wonderful 1979 tome The Book of Heroic Failures ( 9 November, p 31 ). Its guiding principle was that anyone can succeed, but it takes genius to fail in spectacular ways. The notion that great success can come from …

As a neuroscientist who identifies the concept of "me" with a subset of the complex activities in my all-too-mortal brain, I have no problem accepting the notion of "not-being" after my death . As a former embryology teacher, I also had to consider the conundrum, which Lawton mentions in passing, of my "not-being" for aeons …

We still have to do everything, immediately, to fix climate change, says Graham Lawton, but at least we aren't doing nothing ( 9 November, p 22 ). The other day, I drifted into a casual discussion about climate change with a friend who turned out to be a denier. It demonstrated that neither of us …

Fred White likens the climate crisis to an iceberg towards which we, like the Titanic, are heading (Letters, 23 November ). To extend this metaphor: we are metres away from that iceberg and the ship's wheel is broken. For every positive step we take to limit emissions, we slither backwards by electing a Donald Trump …

• When an atom of the hydrogen isotope tritium decays, it emits an electron and an anti-neutrino ( 30 November, p 10 ).