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Clare Wilson reports on disagreements over whether antidepressants work ( 6 October, p 34 ). It seems to me that more emphasis should be placed on treating depression as a suite of conditions rather than a single condition with a single treatment. Some people seem to hold that if a drug doesn't work for everybody, …

Douglas Heaven looks at why we haven't yet detected intelligent life elsewhere ( 6 October, p 15 ). The main point, that we haven't yet looked widely enough, is clearly valid. But Heaven also mentions another point: that Earth may be somehow unusual in its ability to harbour intelligent life. Here's the elephant in the …

These man-children shouldn't be in charge of a spitball, much less nuclear weapons Lucy Burton is quite annoyed at those who would renounce nuclear disarmament treaties ( 27 October, p 3 ) .

I was fascinated and somewhat relieved to read of the possibility that the Incas' knotted khipu express a language ( 29 September, p 33 ). In Bolivia in 1988, a fellow backpacker taught me the craft of making bracelets from colourful knotted threads, called pulsera . I had never seen them before, and neither had …

Mark Barrett correctly points out that in Richard Feynman's path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, a particle is in a sense everywhere at once (Letters, 13 October ). On the same page, Koos Dering says that the interference pattern indicating that the particle has been in two places at once is also evidence that it has …

Kelly Oakes reports that Stephanie Olson wants to rethink how life might influence the make-up of an atmosphere ( 8 September, p 38 ). This rethinking started in James Lovelock's 1967 paper in Icarus , " Life detection by atmospheric analysis ", which noted that "living systems maintain themselves in a state of relatively low …

Gene drives can eliminate species, so Simon Terry and Stephanie Howard propose measures to control them ( 13 October, p 24 ). Some questions do not seem to have been addressed very publicly. The relatively straightforward CRISPR technology can achieve a gene drive. So why has the ever-inventive mechanism of evolution never hit on one? …

You criticise Alessandro Strumia's unacceptable and biologically false comments on the abilities of female physicists ( Leader, 6 October ). His views highlight an appalling, continuing basal sexism that dogs the physical sciences as it does other fields. But to compare Emmy Noether's difficulty in getting a university position with Albert Einstein's life is perhaps …

Roy Harrison is correct when he states that an electric car has a similar carbon dioxide impact to a petrol-powered hybrid car if the batteries are charged from a gas-fired power station with a carbon footprint of 400 grams per kilowatt-hour (Letters, 6 October ). But this is almost never the case. The UK generation …

At its recent conference in Incheon, South Korea, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for a reduction in meat-eating to help reduce global warming. In turn, William Nordhaus, the freshly elevated Nobel laureate in economics, recommended that households should pay a price on their carbon emissions, some of which indirectly result from eating meat …