Letters to the editors for the June 2024 issue of Scientific American
"A Grizzly Question," by Benjamin Cassidy, reports on plans to reintroduce grizzly bears to the North Cascades and on concerns people have raised about their communities' safety. The situations presented in the article are common to many reintroduction activities. One part of this is fear of change. Another might be shortsighted self-concern. The reaction is understandable but questionable.
I've watched many people going into the Yellowstone backcountry, and the common theme has been trepidation. The environment creates an uncomfortable awareness that one, as a person, is not top dog. To have close encounters with formidable creatures is a serious education in one's position in the wilderness -- a lesson that most people cannot abide. This was a factor in the near extinction of grizzlies in the lower 48 states and is a factor in human resistance to their presence.
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DIRK WINDOLF VIA E-MAIL
"The New Code of Life," by Philip Ball, describes some of the types and functions of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) found in human cells and notes that "ncRNAS seem to point to a fuzzier, more collective, logic to life." One possible connection was not mentioned, however: the "RNA world" hypothesis.
Under this concept, an early proto-life-form used RNA both for its enzymatic activities and as its genetic material. Even after evolution replaced this diverse use of RNAs with the specialist molecules of DNA and proteins, RNAs might still retain many functions as a remnant of their earlier roles. So the many ncRNAs that carry out diverse functions could reflect some aspect of an earlier RNA world.
SCOTT T. MEISSNER VIA E-MAIL
"Superheavies," Stephanie Pappas's article about superheavy elements, reminded me of a series of articles on "The Synthetic Elements," by Glenn T. Seaborg and his associates, that were published in Scientific American in April 1950, December 1956, April 1963 and April 1969. In the first article, Seaborg and his co-author started with the synthesis of four elements that had been "missing" from the periodic table and then continued with accounts of how five elements beyond uranium were produced in the laboratory. The series updated every few years as the number of synthesized elements grew. Seaborg paid particular attention to the difficulty in obtaining large enough samples to assess their chemical properties. He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on synthetic elements, and element 106 was named seaborgium in his honor during his lifetime.
"The environment creates an uncomfortable awareness that one, as a person, is not top dog."
-- Dirk Windolf Via E-Mail
I wasn't around when the original articles were published in the 1950s, but my high school physics teacher had a file of old SciAm material that he shared with me. It included articles by Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and other notables. My teacher said I could take whatever I wanted, so I took the whole file and still have it in my library.
BRUCE A. BOYD ST. LOUIS, MO.
"Alien Ice," by Elise Cutts [Advances; April], reports on experiments performed by physical chemist Christina Tonauer and her colleagues that involved ice XIV, a type of "ordered ice" with ordered hydrogen atoms that can be created within days. I'm curious: Did the researchers skip ice IX? I guess avoiding the name would be like skipping floor 13 in a hotel, given the destructive power of the fictional substance "ice-nine" in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 Cat's Cradle. I have no desire for all the liquid in my body to become solid, as happened to characters who got ice-nine in their mouth in the novel, so I hope these scientists are up on their literature.
COLIN MILDE MAHWAH, N.J.
TONAUER REPLIES: There is a real ordered ice called ice IX that we didn't include in our study. We didn't skip it for the fear of the effects of the fictitious ice-nine envisioned by Vonnegut. In fact, there was a scientific reason. The formation process of most ordered ices has a significant kinetic barrier: even though the ordered ice structure should be favored, according to thermodynamics, the process is very slow compared with laboratory timescales. Our study reported new synthesis strategies for overcoming that barrier and ordering ices faster. Real ice IX, on the other hand, is an outlier of that rule because it starts ordering at the relatively high temperature of 208 kelvins. In Olympic terms, it wins a gold medal in the "ordering race" of ice polymorphs, so we did not consider it in our study.
"Treating the Anxious Teen," by BJ Casey and Heidi Meyer, shines a light on advances in the basic clinical science work on addressing fear conditioning. Although this work is important, as respectively current and retired professors of psychology, we would like to note that such optimism is not uniform in the field. In a 2023 review in the journal Behavior Research and Therapy, psychologist Ronald M. Rapee and his colleagues state that when it comes to the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy in children and adolescents, "there remains substantial room for improvement."
One of the issues is that children's needs are different from those of adults. When children and adolescents are being treated, their developmental status regarding emotional self-regulation and cognition must be taken into account. Therapeutic practices developed with adults can have contradictory effects with children. For example, adults find that fear interferes with their ability to follow through with functional routines. Remove the fear, and adults can resume functionality. Children and teens are still learning what functional routines are, so they need opportunities to practice healthy, functional behavior patterns tailored to the kinds of experiences they have outside of the therapy office. Novel interventions that are quite different from standard cognitive-behavioral therapy have shown promise.
ERICA KLEINKNECHT O'SHEA FOREST GROVE, ORE.
RONALD KLEINKNECHT BELLINGHAM, WASH.
"Homeschooling Needs More Uniform Oversight," by the Editors [Science Agenda], incorrectly described the 11-year-old boy who was found dead in 2020 as located in Michigan. His family had moved from that state to California a few months prior.
"The End of the Lab Rat?," by Rachel Nuwer [September], should have said that outside researchers have used Emulate's chips to create more than 30 additional models with cells from their labs, not about 70 such models.
In "What If We Never Find Dark Matter?," by Tracy R. Slatyer and Tim M. P. Tait [September], the opening illustration should have been credited to Olena Shmahalo.
"Nobel Connections," by Sarah Lewin Frasier and Jen Christiansen [Graphic Science; October], should have referred to Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi.