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Fly-by chaos
See newscientist.com for letters on: ● Fantasy banking ● Electric caveats ● Uranium hazards ● History of the ozone hole ● Hearing graphs
cattle later grazing those fields. I suggest that fat people are able to retain much higher levels of POPs in their body, and so suffer the diabetes-inducing effects for longer. And I fear that a whole generation of humans ate high levels of lipophilic organic phosphates in meat before food authorities reduced the levels deemed acceptable. Kilmore, Victoria, Australia
Forest peoples’ rights From John Nelson, Forest Peoples Programme Hunter-gatherers in the Congo basin will be happy to hear that international conservation organisations are finally realising how important they are to the conservation of tropical wildlife (20 September, p 6). Baka Pygmy communities were hunting sustainably in forests recently overlapped by the Boumba Bek and Nki national parks in southeast Cameroon long before biological researchers arrived to
find such abundance on their lands. It was the Baka who first showed the researchers around. The arrival of big conservation organisations coincided with the introduction of boundaries and rules, and violent repression against their communities by forest guards. Funds from wellmeaning people in Europe and North America are still helping to pay for these violations of indigenous peoples’ rights. To conserve wildlife, the Baka are demanding to become recognised as the main guardians of their forests – a development that would be in accordance with widely agreed conservation principles and intergovernmental agreements. Conservation organisations in Cameroon have since accepted revised management plans in the Campo Ma’an National Park, allowing Bagyeli Pygmy communities to go back to hunting and gathering in their traditional hunting grounds. Surely it is time for international conservation organisations to put these principles into practice everywhere. Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, UK
Fly-by chaos From Eric Solomon Marcus Chown writes about possible sources of the anomalies in spacecraft’s fly-by velocities (20 September, p 38). Surprisingly, he does not mention that
calculating the interaction of the Earth, moon and spacecraft is a three-body problem, doable only by iterative approximation, and tends to chaos. Could the anomalies arise from errors in the approximations? London, UK
who are fed placebos while the more fortunate are cured by the miracle drug under test. That said, is it too late for me to gorge on marshmallows and become happy and successful? Tuross Head, New South Wales, Australia
Sweet success
Bat mobile
From Tony Turner Walter Mischel’s experiment to determine whether 4-year-olds could resist marshmallows was interesting, but his conclusions were wide of the mark (13 September, p 40). The children who had two marshmallows did better in life than the children who had one. So marshmallows are essential for a child’s development, and two are better than one. Indeed, I would encourage all those who were denied that crucial second marshmallow to mount a classaction suit, as may those in the control group in any experiment
Enigma A colourful turn No. 1516 Susan Denham
I HAVE a little trick with eight cards. Their backs are all white but the fronts are one each of apricot, blue, chocolate, green, orange, primrose, red and terracotta. I place them in a pile in a certain order, white sides up. Then I spell out one of the colours, moving one card from the top of the pile www.newscientist.com
to the bottom as I say each letter. As I reach the last letter of the spelling I turn over that card and (lo and behold!) it is that colour. I then place that card at the bottom of the pile and spell out another colour. In this way I work through all the colours, finishing with the apricot. In the course of the trick the chocolate card is turned over later than the terracotta one. List (by their initials) the order in which I spell out the colours.
£15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on 19 November. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1516, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). The winner of Enigma 1510 is Peter Chapman of Perth, Australia. Answer to 1510 Triangular threesome (a) 27966 (b) 15400 and 58311
From Warner Haldane Perhaps the answer to bats exploding in low-pressure vortices at the tips of windturbine blades (30 August, p 4) is to fit the blades with winglets. As I understand it, the winglets attached to the ends of aircraft wings increase efficiency by reducing vortex formation. So perhaps winglets would not only help to reduce bat deaths, but also increase efficiency. Of course, they might just present another sharp edge to chop up passing birds. Whakatane, New Zealand
For the record ● The paper by Mile Gu and colleagues on emergent properties of Ising lattices is at www.arxiv.org/abs/0809.0151 (4 October, p 12). ● We said ambiguously that “a molecule released by bacteria called lipopolysaccharide seems to initiate tolerance” to bacteria (27 September, p 16). To clarify: lipopolysaccharides are a class of molecules. ● We seemed to say both that pterosaurs weighed up to a quarter of a tonne and that they were four times heavier than a 22-kilogram albatross (4 October, p 10). We meant to say that members of the extinct teratorn family of birds weighed up to 88 kilograms – which is more than the proposed 40 kilogram limit for flight. Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
18 October 2008 | NewScientist | 21
cattle later grazing those fields. I suggest that fat people are able to retain much higher levels of POPs in their body, and so suffer the diabetes-inducing effects for longer. And I fear that a whole generation of humans ate high levels of lipophilic organic phosphates in meat before food authorities reduced the levels deemed acceptable. Kilmore, Victoria, Australia
Forest peoples’ rights From John Nelson, Forest Peoples Programme Hunter-gatherers in the Congo basin will be happy to hear that international conservation organisations are finally realising how important they are to the conservation of tropical wildlife (20 September, p 6). Baka Pygmy communities were hunting sustainably in forests recently overlapped by the Boumba Bek and Nki national parks in southeast Cameroon long before biological researchers arrived to
find such abundance on their lands. It was the Baka who first showed the researchers around. The arrival of big conservation organisations coincided with the introduction of boundaries and rules, and violent repression against their communities by forest guards. Funds from wellmeaning people in Europe and North America are still helping to pay for these violations of indigenous peoples’ rights. To conserve wildlife, the Baka are demanding to become recognised as the main guardians of their forests – a development that would be in accordance with widely agreed conservation principles and intergovernmental agreements. Conservation organisations in Cameroon have since accepted revised management plans in the Campo Ma’an National Park, allowing Bagyeli Pygmy communities to go back to hunting and gathering in their traditional hunting grounds. Surely it is time for international conservation organisations to put these principles into practice everywhere. Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, UK
Fly-by chaos From Eric Solomon Marcus Chown writes about possible sources of the anomalies in spacecraft’s fly-by velocities (20 September, p 38). Surprisingly, he does not mention that
calculating the interaction of the Earth, moon and spacecraft is a three-body problem, doable only by iterative approximation, and tends to chaos. Could the anomalies arise from errors in the approximations? London, UK
who are fed placebos while the more fortunate are cured by the miracle drug under test. That said, is it too late for me to gorge on marshmallows and become happy and successful? Tuross Head, New South Wales, Australia
Sweet success
Bat mobile
From Tony Turner Walter Mischel’s experiment to determine whether 4-year-olds could resist marshmallows was interesting, but his conclusions were wide of the mark (13 September, p 40). The children who had two marshmallows did better in life than the children who had one. So marshmallows are essential for a child’s development, and two are better than one. Indeed, I would encourage all those who were denied that crucial second marshmallow to mount a classaction suit, as may those in the control group in any experiment
Enigma A colourful turn No. 1516 Susan Denham
I HAVE a little trick with eight cards. Their backs are all white but the fronts are one each of apricot, blue, chocolate, green, orange, primrose, red and terracotta. I place them in a pile in a certain order, white sides up. Then I spell out one of the colours, moving one card from the top of the pile www.newscientist.com
to the bottom as I say each letter. As I reach the last letter of the spelling I turn over that card and (lo and behold!) it is that colour. I then place that card at the bottom of the pile and spell out another colour. In this way I work through all the colours, finishing with the apricot. In the course of the trick the chocolate card is turned over later than the terracotta one. List (by their initials) the order in which I spell out the colours.
£15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on 19 November. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1516, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). The winner of Enigma 1510 is Peter Chapman of Perth, Australia. Answer to 1510 Triangular threesome (a) 27966 (b) 15400 and 58311
From Warner Haldane Perhaps the answer to bats exploding in low-pressure vortices at the tips of windturbine blades (30 August, p 4) is to fit the blades with winglets. As I understand it, the winglets attached to the ends of aircraft wings increase efficiency by reducing vortex formation. So perhaps winglets would not only help to reduce bat deaths, but also increase efficiency. Of course, they might just present another sharp edge to chop up passing birds. Whakatane, New Zealand
For the record ● The paper by Mile Gu and colleagues on emergent properties of Ising lattices is at www.arxiv.org/abs/0809.0151 (4 October, p 12). ● We said ambiguously that “a molecule released by bacteria called lipopolysaccharide seems to initiate tolerance” to bacteria (27 September, p 16). To clarify: lipopolysaccharides are a class of molecules. ● We seemed to say both that pterosaurs weighed up to a quarter of a tonne and that they were four times heavier than a 22-kilogram albatross (4 October, p 10). We meant to say that members of the extinct teratorn family of birds weighed up to 88 kilograms – which is more than the proposed 40 kilogram limit for flight. Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
18 October 2008 | NewScientist | 21