7 September 2019 | New Scientist | 27From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard,
North Yorkshire, UK
Assuming that people who
have no teeth at all wouldn’t
be troubled by plaque-dwelling
bacteria, I wonder whether any
correlation has been sought
between toothlessness and
the prevalence of the diseases
identified by MacKenzie.
The editor writes:
These bacteria can get into your
bloodstream just by chewing, so
even having all your teeth pulled
at an early age may not prevent
exposure. Others will be toothless
because of gum disease – the cow
is out of the barn for them.
How could evolution arise
from conscious agents?
3 August, p 34
From Paul Mealing,
Melbourne, Australia
Donald Hoffman claims to have
used the theory of evolution by
natural selection to discover that
what we perceive isn’t objective
reality, but an interface with it.
He says evolution itself may be
just an interface projection of
deeper dynamics stemming from
a network of conscious agents. But
such agents arrive late in the fossil
record, so how could evolution
arise before they existed?
When super-rotation was
still an incredible idea
22 June, p 42
From Ed Prior,
Poquoson, Virginia, US
In her excellent article, Leah Crane
mentions that the atmosphere of
Venus “inexplicably rotates 60
times faster than the solid planet”.
We first learned of this implausible
phenomenon in the 1960s when
Desmond King-Hele discovered
that Earth’s atmosphere rotates
up to 50 per cent faster about
370 kilometres up than it does
near the planet’s surface.
King-Hele developed the
physics of orbital mechanics to
detect the effects of atmospheric
drag on satellites. He found that
the rotating upper atmosphere
causes a slow decrease in a
satellite’s orbital inclination,
and could then determine the
rotation rate of the atmosphere
at its altitude. My work at NASA
Langley on the Air Density Explorer
satellites, which released balloons
in orbit, benefited greatly from
King-Hele’s work. There was once
scepticism about the idea of super-
rotation. The discovery of the
astonishing behaviour of Venus’s
atmosphere seems to have
established this phenomenon.I applaud your hearty
serving of wrasse
20 July, p 17, p 19 and p 34
From Simon French,
Totnes, Devon, UK
I very much enjoyed the quantity
of wrasse in one issue. Your report
of a new purple species of fairy
wrasse was followed two pages
later by bluehead wrasse changing
sex. Then, you quoted string
theorist Timm Wrase. ❚For the record
❚ Matthew Williams at Cardiff
University, UK, and his colleagues
created – on their own initiative –
a “dashboard” that flags between
500,000 and 800,000 tweets
per day related to Brexit. Of these,
between 0.2 per cent and 0.5 per
cent are classified as hateful, and
about 0.2 per cent of those have
tags for users’ locations in the UK
(31 August, p 6).
❚ Weight a moment: Galileo
Galilei is said to have proved that
the acceleration due to gravity that
objects experience is unrelated to
their mass (13 July, p 42).20 years ago, New Scientist
was bidding goodbye to a symbol
of international space cooperationMIR wasn’t Jean-Pierre
Haigneré’s favourite place.
Asked what the ageing Soviet
space station he was staying
on smelled and sounded like,
the French astronaut said: “Mir
to me sometimes smells like
burnt coffee. The background
noise is similar to the engine
room of a boat or a noisy
aeroplane. The numerous fans aboard the station are
the primary source of this nuisance, which averages
67 decibels. I have completely forgotten what silence
is like.” On whether he had any privacy, his answer
was even more definitive: “No!”
The interview, published in New Scientist’s
4 September 1999 issue, marked the culmination of
Haigneré’s second stint orbiting Earth, as well as the
impending end of Mir’s long-term crewed operations.
Mir, whose name means “peace” or “world” in
Russian, was launched in 1986. It developed out of
the Salyut programme, which had launched a series
of smaller space stations starting in 1971. That had
made the Soviet Union the undisputed leader in the
field: the US had only ever had one space station in
orbit, the short-lived Skylab.
Once in orbit, Mir lived up to its name, with an
increasingly international crew showing a new spirit
of cooperation in space. They devoted themselves to
experiments in human biology, physics, astronomy
and meteorology, all while orbiting Earth 15.7 times
a day at about 27,700 kilometres per hour.
Mir developed a reputation for its astonishing
ability to survive disaster after disaster, including
computer failures, oxygen leaks, on-board fires and,
of course, the 1991 collapse of the state that had
launched it. For all his reservations, Haigneré was
proud of Mir’s achievements, especially in its straitened
final post-Soviet years. “At the moment, procedures are
not applied strictly enough. But that is natural given
the reduction of resources. In our Western system,
everything would have come to a halt a long time
ago,” he said.
Despite efforts by a privately funded company
to reactivate and repair Mir, it deorbited on 23 March
2001, breaking up on re-entry over the Pacific Ocean.
Yet its spirit lives on. Russian ideas for a successor were
combined with US Reagan-era plans to give humanity
a new home in space from 2000 onwards: the
International Space Station. Simon IngsTo find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientistViews From the archives
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