Letters archive

You report that the boom in solar energy around the world has led to panels being installed on prime agricultural land. This is bad news, and there are many more sensible alternatives: most obviously barren desert land that can't grow food ( 6 July, p 10 ). Another option would be the roofs of buildings, …

Moheb Costandi writes that artificial intelligence can analyse the neuronal activity of movie watchers and identify which scenes they were observing. While this shows we can map commonality in brain activity for AIs to tap into, we lack the ability to capture the phenomenological quality of the "experience". For AIs to cross the divide into …

You highlight problems with the growing demand for energy-intensive air conditioning in a warming world. How about updating building regulations so that new air conditioning installations must be accompanied by solar panels? Peak cooling demand (and electricity consumption) can be expected to correlate with daytime maximum solar radiation and maximum solar panel output ( 6 …

I resonated strongly with Harvey Whitehouse's point that "if we are to mature into a global tribe, capable of solving global problems, we will also need leaders capable of crossing existing tribal divisions", and that this requires "ways that are grounded in science" to address our collective interests ( 22 June, p 36 ). I …

Our climate and biodiversity woes represent a threat greater than a world war. As we would with such a conflict, we need to spend our resources wisely on projects that will reap rewards immediately, or at least within the 20 years or so we have to make the biggest impact ( 6 July, p 13 …

The cool fabric for clothing that you describe may be rewarding for the scientists who designed it, but could it be damaging to the environment? Its three layers – wool or cotton, silver nanowires and polymethylpentene – could be a nightmare to recycle, particularly as many people wear fashionable items for a short period and …

I take issue with Dan Roach's assertion that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. You could equally make the case that there is no safe level of driving or playing football or swimming. Perhaps there is no safe level of being alive, given it always seems to end badly ( Letters, 6 July …

I have an idea related to David Robson's look at scientific rules of connection that could improve your social life. One way for pubs, parks, libraries and other social spaces to help would be to paint a large red dot on the ground. This would be a place where people who want to develop new …

Recent talk of consciousness in various organisms has got me thinking. Rather than trying to investigate whether organism X has consciousness, surely a more ethical standpoint would be to assume by default that they are all conscious, so any investigation should be reversed. I suspect it would be hard to prove the absence of consciousness …

There are two problems with arguments in favour of Dyson spheres, massive structures that advanced alien species might build to capture all of a star's energy. First, long before a civilisation could build one, the issue of hydrogen fusion would have been solved and so abundant energy would be available. Second, if the aliens' star …