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Le Page's outline for designing houses to combat climate change sounded rather familiar. Our house is shaded by trees, has dense walls 760 millimetres thick and is partially underground. It is approximately three times as long as it is wide and high, with small windows left open at night. Without air conditioning, it has remained …

Poppy-Jayne Morgan reports on glasses that project emojis to help children with autism read faces ( 11 August, p 10 ). She says of one that "Alex's gaze avoidance remained a significant issue for him". Is this not projecting onto an autistic boy the emotional state of his mother? I have seen others suggest that, …

I'm still not going to take it. Apparently you are as sick as a dog afterwards. Claire Farrow is not motivated by a report that taking ayahuasca is like having a near-death experience ( 25 August, p 14 )

I have often wondered whether mouth wounds heal faster than skin wounds, and it was good to see research answering this ( 4 August, p 16 ). It seems to open up new research possibilities related to wound healing. I now wonder whether the genes involved are evolutionarily conserved, ancient and now widespread. They would …

Sam Edge says current smart meters are a flawed way for electricity generators to try to reduce peak demand (Letters, 11 August ). They do need to do this, but the plan to use smart meters to adjust electricity prices to encourage people to use more off-peak power, and thereby less peak power, has me …

You report behavioural ecologist Betty McGuire finding that small dogs tend to aim high when urinating and suggest that this may be the canine equivalent of macho posturing ( 11 August, p 13 ). I'm not sure. Anyone who walks dogs will attest that they continually sample scents, and often investigate a site closely before …

Guy Cox describes how eukaryotes are thought to have evolved by an archaeon engulfing a bacterium that then became the mitochondrion (The Last Word, 28 July ). Other engulfed bacteria became chloroplasts in plants. These processes seem to have happened only a few times, suggesting they were very unlikely to succeed. Archaea and bacteria have …

The speaker schedule for your Â鶹´«Ã½ Live event on 20-23 September includes " Should robots have rights? " ( 11 August , back page). More pertinent, especially to those displaced by robots, is: should robots pay tax? No rights without responsibilities!

I read that the melting Totten glacier could on its own raise sea levels by 3 metres ( 11 August, p 4 ). Really? It must be very big. The editor writes : • It is: its catchment area is more than 500,000 square kilometres and researchers in fact say that its total loss could …

• The shield of the Parker Solar Probe is necessary to protect against radiation from the sun's surface ( 18 August, p 5 ).