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Technology probably can't answer the question of whether to prioritise the lives of pedestrians or vehicle occupants during a driverless car crash ( 27 October, p 6 ). But it can be used to give pedestrians a better chance of surviving. The biggest claim made by car makers is that driverless cars will reduce traffic …

Chelsea Whyte's article on who to spare in an accident highlights the different views on this of various cultures. Culture also affects science and hence may influence research on this subject. Surely the way to eliminate cultural bias is to let those creating the risk die and save innocent participants who are in harm's way. …

Questioning people about who they think should be saved in a road accident might be useful in developing some sort of morality basis for driverless cars. But it is odd to frame this in terms of whether pedestrians are criminals or doctors. When an accident is imminent, neither any humans involved nor any controlling artificial …

Driverless cars don't need ethics . What they do need is to be capable of following the rules of the road. The bits about not running into people are common sense. Leave the ethics to philosophers. The wider point in this debate is that driverless cars wouldn't be distracted by mobile phones, drunk, drugged or …

We are asked whose life our driverless car should spare in a crash: a family of four in the car or "a pregnant woman, a doctor and a criminal" who are standing nearby? Is the latter one, two or three people? Does the car's decision depend on how stereotypically it thinks?

Debora MacKenzie reports a finding based on data from 174 countries that more education is what makes people live longer, not more money ( 28 April, p 12 ). I used this as a springboard for a school maths assignment. I calculated the correlation of wealth, education and life expectancy, using data only for Africa. …

I accept that electric cars are a cause of carbon emissions, as Tom Watts points out (Letters, 29 September ). But I note that the UK's national grid averages suppliers across the country. While my Nissan Leaf was on charge between 2 am and 4 am this morning, 31 per cent of the electricity used …

You say the Earth-moon system has a set of five gravitational balance points, where the gravitational forces from Earth and the moon balance out, and that objects can get trapped in these regions, called Lagrange points ( 3 November, p 8 ). You could have made it clearer that objects cannot get trapped in three …

As a radio-communication engineer, I am surprised at the choice of the term "fast radio burst" (FRB) for the mysterious bursts of radio-frequency energy detected in space ( 27 October, p 8 ). Surely these emissions travel at the same speed as any other electromagnetic energy? Better terms would be: brief radio burst (BRB) or …

Douglas Heaven says our hunt for alien life is far from over ( 6 October, p 15 ). The frustration felt at the absence of alien life detection thus far needs tempering by a thought not mentioned. The writer Arthur C. Clarke is reported to have observed that "we are either alone in the universe, …