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I agree with Trevor Prew's sentiments on drains as an indicator of the first true civilisations. I would go slightly further and say that public conveniences are a key indicator. In my part of the country, funding of many public toilets was stopped and they closed. It seems we are less civilised than before ( …

Lisa Feldman Barrett is at Northeastern University in Massachusetts ( 15 March, p 30 ). Accretion disc light from a black hole in galaxy 3C 186 was blueshifted relative to its galaxy as a whole ( 15 March, p 19 ). Pufferfish acquire the toxin tetrodotoxin from their diet, rather than producing it themselves ( …

I have no problem with government ministers using artificial intelligence to inform themselves. It is positive that UK minister Peter Kyle has done so and explained some of the topics he has explored. It is vital to understand some of the limitations ( 22 March, p 10 ). I have used ChatGPT and learned two …

Annalee Newitz's comments, saying we shouldn't blame communication technology for authoritarian regimes abusing social media or the nightmare of AI chatbots generating lies, apply to most inventions. Tempering steel and splitting the atom had the potential to hugely improve our lives, but it didn't take long for us to kill one another using both. Any …

The interview with Jaap de Roode made me wonder why people are surprised that animals do things to treat their ailments. Many have been around a lot longer than us and they have developed an understanding of the healing properties of plants, etc. Humans sought cures for the basic reason that they wanted to survive, …

This rekindled memories of the start of my veterinary career in north-east Scotland in 1981. It was common then for a suckler beef farm to have an area of "rough ground": a field of wild bushes, rushes, weeds and, simply put, whatever grew in that region that wasn't a tree. It was commonly used as …

On the idea of learning to be less fooled by optical illusions, I do some lecture-performances to illusion-savvy audiences about pataphysics, art, zombie theory and so on. I tell them they just can't trust their brains, and build up to... the Müller-Lyer illusion, the one with two identical lines where one looks longer because of …

I enjoyed your look at old code, having written a fair bit myself in the programming language C. Some of that may well still run in home gadgets, maybe even your TV. It isn't just business systems that are powered by old code ( 8 March, p 34 ).

On the suggestion that civilisation is tied to domestic drainage, may I recommend that Trevor Prew take a trip to Orkney in Scotland, to visit the village of Skara Brae, where there is an example of such a system that predates the arrival of the sewer-loving Romans ( Letters, 15 March ).

The void aliens will be coming to get timescape inventor David Wiltshire soon, well before the aliens of the galaxy clusters, who would be disadvantaged by gravity and a passing of 4 billion years less time (according to Wiltshire's idea) in which to develop their technology ( 8 March, p 26 ).