54 | NewScientist | 3 November 2018[email protected] @newscientist newscientist
LETTERS
of threads to a young girl from
the family I was staying with, in
a mud brick and thatch cottage
on the island of Amantani in
Lake Titicaca. Apparently, locally
made pulseras were for sale in
the area not long after.
Ever since, I have been
concerned that I might have
unintentionally triggered this
disruption to the making and
selling of their traditional loom-
woven belts and bags, which carry
meaningful designs of their own.The possible chaotic
effect of wind farmsFrom Sean Confrey,
Notton, West Yorkshire, UK
Michael Le Page accepts that wind
farms may affect climate – but
don’t cause global warming
(13 October, p 25). Back in 1972,
meteorologist Edward Lorenz
noted that the flapping of the
wings of a butterfly in China
may alter the course of a
hurricane in the Caribbean.
This “butterfly effect” was
used to illustrate chaos theory
by showing how small changes
in initial conditions may lead tolarge variations in the eventual
results. What might be revealed
when we start to analyse the wind
data from the European Space
Agency’s Aeolus satellite?
Wind farms must remove
energy from the system: and that
is consequently unavailable to the
weather downwind. As a result it
may, or may not, rain elsewhere.
Surely removing energy from the
atmosphere at the rate of many
terawatts has a greater effect on it
than taking the same amount of
energy from the tides has on the
Earth-moon system. Have there
been any studies on the effects of
large wind farms on the weather?Everything in the future
is a quantum waveFrom Paul Mealing,
Melbourne, Australia
Mark Barrett correctly points
out that in Richard Feynman’s
path-integral formulation of
quantum mechanics, a particle
is in a sense everywhere at once
(Letters, 13 October). On the same
page, Koos Dering says that the
interference pattern indicating
that the particle has been in twoplaces at once is also evidence that
it has not been “seen”’.
Philip Ball writes in his book
Beyond Weird that superposition
isn’t really two states at once, but
a circumstance in which either
state is a possible measurement
outcome. There is a ready-made
explanation for this if one adopts
William Lawrence Bragg’s one-line
exposition: “Everything in the
future is a wave, everything in the
past is a particle.” The path that a
particle follows in a double-slit
experiment can be determined
only in retrospect.If you’re looking for life,
best start from hereFrom Richard Probst,
Los Altos, California, US
Kelly Oakes reports that Stephanie
Olson wants to rethink how life
might influence the make-up of
an atmosphere (8 September,
p 38). This rethinking started
in James Lovelock’s 1967 paper
in Icarus, “Life detection by
atmospheric analysis”, which
noted that “living systems
maintain themselves in a state
of relatively low entropy at theLetters should be sent to:
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use any submissions sent to the letters column of
New Scientist magazine, in any other format.expense of their nonliving
environments”. Lovelock then
declined to work on instruments
for the Viking landers, pointing
out that the experiments could
be done more cheaply from Earth
than on Mars.Has evolution hit on
gene drives for itself?From Tim Stevenson,
Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, UK
Gene drives can eliminate species,
so Simon Terry and Stephanie
Howard propose measures to
control them (13 October, p 24).
Some questions do not seem to
have been addressed very publicly.
The relatively straightforward
CRISPR technology can achieve
a gene drive. So why has the
ever-inventive mechanism of
evolution never hit on one? Or has
it – have any extinctions been due
to the accidental arising of a drive?
And would a gene drive actually
send a species extinct, or would
evolution find a way out?What other species
depend on mosquitoes?From Erik Kvaalen,
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Marjorie Meldrum asks about
species that rely on mosquitoes as
a food source, posing a downside
to eradicating them with a gene
drive (Letters, 6 October). As far as
I know, there are none. Some bats
eat them, but don’t rely on them.The editor writes:
■ Mosquitoes and their larvae are
a significant source of food for
many birds and fish. There are
also orchids that rely entirely on
mosquitoes as pollinators.