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Your discussion of inelegance in fundamental physics ( 3 March, p 30 ) once again deals with those in retreat from the idea that the laws of nature should be sublime rather than arbitrary – known as "naturalness" – as they dance warily around alternatives. They seem unwilling to grant the anthropic principle and the …

I was struck by one suggestion in your look at resistance to "ugly" cosmological physics: that the surprisingly small mass of the Higgs boson is the net result of a large positive number (its "interaction" mass) and a slightly smaller negative number (its "inherent" mass). This seems parallel to another cosmological oddity – the large …

If only chemistry coveted beauty as much as fundamental physics. In 1952, starting chemistry at school, I was repelled by the lop-sided conventional periodic table, which helped to turn me away from science. The fact this version persists when more elegant ones are available suggests that chemists do not want beauty.

May I report a highly effective way to counter interruptions while talking, to add to those offered in your article ( 10 March, p 34 ). In the 1980s, I sat on the council of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs trade union. Meetings were always attended by the extrovert and voluble general …

When I taught medical students I passed on several tips when it comes to interruption. I told them it is grossly impolite to do so mid-sentence. If you must interrupt, do so while the speaker is taking a breath at the end of a sentence. That is why politicians are trained to take breaths mid-sentence …

What particularly infuriates me – and was missing from your examples of interruptions – is people butting in to counter a point I haven't even made.

One factor may be missed when comparing war severity between 1823 and 2003 using fatalities, as in the study questioning if we are in a new era of peace ( 3 March, p 15 ). Recent wars have had fewer fatalities, but perhaps not because they were less severe. Weapons are increasingly potent but trauma …

What an exemplary article on cryptography Michael Brooks presented to us ( 3 March, p 40 ). As we seek algorithms to ensure security against code-cracking quantum computers, surely we ought to be considering how such security will be rolled out across the myriad of devices that will no-doubt be in use for years to …

An algorithm that guides the sparing use of treatments to prevent the evolution of drug resistance in prostate cancer is interesting ( 10 March, p 4 ). It struck me that it might be possible to use the same strategy to prevent the evolution of microbes that survive the use of antibiotics.

I had a good laugh when reading that a common trait in those who support authoritarian leaders is a hatred of bad body odours ( 10 March, p 17 ). Seriously though, getting sniffy about out-groups must have been a problem older than our species. One wonders how we ever managed to conglomerate into large …