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It is interesting that altruism was used to explain why orcas were apparently offering people gifts. This is based on a human trait, but there is another possible explanation also based on human activity. We frequently offer small edible titbits, usually on the end of a line, with the purpose of securing much larger eatables. …

You report on home solar being vulnerable to hacks that could derail power grids. My solar installation poses little or no threat as its design limits its output to the grid so that, in the event of there being no demand for its electricity, it will detect this and reduce output appropriately( 12 July, p …

I couldn't agree more with Suzanne O'Sullivan that the half-baked UK government plan to screen all newborns for hundreds of gene variants is dangerous, a waste of money and unscientific( 12 July, p 21 ). As well as being pointless from a clinical point of view, as with previous plans to put babies' fingerprints or …

Your description of traces of an isolated population of early humans, never more than a few hundred individuals, has them "scattered over a distance of 1500 km" from Britain to Poland. This is more likely to point to a single, cohesive clan that, over centuries, migrated either east or west over this distance. Such a …

Kudos for a cogent article on a vital subject: competition vs cooperation and the individual vs the group. Nature requires both. Without competition, evolution can't operate. Without cooperation, it can't produce interesting results( 12 July, p 38 ). As suggested, when we ask if human nature is selfish or altruistic, we are asking the wrong …

So "AI companies and tech analysts alike say the agentic AI revolution is just around the corner"( 12 July, p 34 ). That would be in the same way as commercial nuclear fusion, fully autonomous all-road cars, personal flying vehicles, paperless offices and world peace, then?

The creators of AI agents that will run our lives for us need a posh motto. I suggest: "Living? Our servants will do that for us." It is from the play Axël by French writer Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

Agatha Windig is probably on to something with her observation that contact lenses stop the tears while chopping onions, but not that it involves the iris and pupil. A rigid gas-permeable lens would probably filter out the volatiles that the onions release, keeping them from irritating the surface of the eye, the cornea, which would …

I see that orcas, by offering what appear to be gifts for us, are experimenting on us, presumably to determine our intelligence and whether we are worth teaming up with (or maybe domesticating). I'd love to know their conclusions( 12 July, p 19 ).

Carl-Friedrich Schleussner is at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria ( 26 July, p 8 ) Influenza viruses have an RNA genome ( 12 July, p 16 ).