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David Werdegar says “it is impossible for us to think without language” (Letters, 20 July ). But people who have severe aphasia – loss of language abilities – because of strokes or other brain damage may be unimpaired in other thinking abilities, including arithmetic, logical and causal reasoning, chess playing, spatial navigation and theory of …

Trying to explain away the “hard problem” of consciousness, Rowan Hooper claims qualia are illusory and so there is nothing to explain ( 22 June, p 34 ). He says “we don't normally talk about our qualia, we talk about things such as being tired”. But that misses the point. A smartphone can register that …

• Matthew Williams at Cardiff University, UK, and his colleagues created – on their own initiative – a “dashboard” that flags between 500,000 and 800,000 tweets per day related to Brexit. Of these, between 0.2 per cent and 0.5 per cent are classified as hateful, and about 0.2 per cent of those have tags for …

Opening �鶹��ý is like stepping into a stream of cool fresh air, free of tendentious partisan advocacy and suffused by a balanced, evidence-based view of the world – an example being Andre Geim's expression of regret over Brexit and its likely effect on scientific enquiry ( 24 August, p 23 ).

In the interests of science and the country, Geim proposes , the UK must implement the result of the referendum and leave the EU. But leading hard-line Brexiteers follow a political and economic philosophy that aims to reduce the role of a societal state in myriad ways: lower standards for food and products, less support …

Andrew Barron's perceptive view of the simplistic idea that only two types of sexual orientation exist is supported by large data sets that I have been accumulating since 2006 ( 17 August, p 23 ). In 2012, I published a study of 17,785 participants from 48 countries that supports the assertion by biologist Alfred Kinsey …

As Wiebina Heesterman notes, kitchen appliances generate nearly seven times as many emissions as food transport (Letters, 24 August ). Cooking in a microwave or on the hob takes much less energy than heating a conventional oven, but instructions on ready meals and in recipes usually specify the oven, which is unnecessary for curries and …

Simon Ings reviews Daniel Milo's Good Enough: The tolerance for mediocrity in nature and society , which argues that, in the absence of proof of a specific evolutionary advantage, giraffes' long necks should be considered the fruit of chance ( 20 July, p 28 ). But since they clearly have major disadvantages, if they had …

We need to look at an organic diet and compare the health outcomes in groups of people who consume organic foods with those who don't, suggests Aroha Mahoney (Letters, 3 August ). There is a study that monitored the diet and health of nearly 70,000 people for seven years. It found 25 per cent lower …

I read your article on gold prospecting using tree leaves with interest ( 17 August, p 12 ). One way to improve detection might be to analyse the shallow soil where leaves fall and rot each year, concentrating the metals locally over time. As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I saw this on the Downs, …