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Richard Smyth says the growing trend of seeing our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing is a mistake. But "existential" or "mysterious" are surely better words to describe it than "spiritual". Bertrand Russell, the great atheist philosopher, famously said: "We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and …

Smyth is absolutely right that there are no lessons to be learned from nature. Morality and meaning cannot be obtained from nature or its study; their true source is elsewhere. It is hard not to feel that the deification of nature is a substitute for traditional religious belief. The fundamental question is: is nature – …

Paul Whiteley points out that 75 per cent of the sunlight hitting solar panels is lost as heat, but roof-top solar water heaters convert 95 per cent into hot water. So let's combine the two! Have a layer of water between the solar panel and a glass plate, as in a solar water heater. The …

Bryn Glover gives a negative assessment of the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. This is based on a New Scientist article stating the odds of the formation of the last universal common ancestor from a soup of chemicals as "less than 1 in a billion" ( Letters, 3 January ). Of course, we …

Decades ago, New Scientist ran a feature about Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance, which posits that once something comes into being, recurrence becomes easier. He used crystallisation as an example: once accomplished, it becomes subsequently easier to do. We are in the universe; the universe is in us. All is one. As far as …

After reading Alex Wilkins's article on the mystery of the missing meteorite, I asked Google's AI assistant whether you can make a pigment for painting rocks using iron meteorites, and whether iron objects look shinier in low morning or midday light. Its answer to both questions was yes. If accurate, this may indicate that Gaston …

In the article "Rapa Nui statues may have been built by small groups", the important materials utilised for the construction of these numerous and impressive stone statues are referred to only as having originated from "one quarry supplying the rock" ( 6 December 2025, p 17 ). Perhaps this is of no concern to most …

The record X-ray pulse produced by LCLS-II in 2024 carried a terawatt of power ( 10 January, p 15 ).

Ian Smith criticises my comparison of modern SUVs with older small cars. But I didn't make that comparison. Rather, it was made by Anthony Laverty in his opinion piece. I simply pointed out that, counterintuitively, the switch in public preference had probably led to a substantial reduction in fossil-fuel consumption. In my personal experience, that …

Some letter writers seem to have missed some of the implications of living in a simulation. It is provably impossible to detect that we are in a simulation. Should anyone discover a "fact" that reveals the simulation, the system admin can stop the run, edit out the rogue fact and restart from a backup ( …