51¶¯Âþ

Chris Stokel-Walker's piece, "A very serious guide to buying a robot butler", took me back to some research I carried out 12 years ago with some 80 pupils, who were about 12 years old, about their visions of what robots would do in the future. Domestic duties featured large in their responses, but on being …

Some readers suggest using age-restricted devices to enforce a social media ban. Such a measure can be easily circumvented by using a shared computer or buying an extra device to access social media. A cheap smartphone or tablet can be had for no more than the cost of a week's lunch or a month's vaping. …

Can species evolve fast enough to survive climate change? The answer is no! What has been observed by these researchers is an example of ecological genetics in action. The genetic polymorphism within the population means some individuals will already possess the necessary genes to enable them to survive climate change. The number of these individuals …

I enjoyed Michael Le Page's article about fast evolution in scarlet monkeyflowers. But I don't think we should call this evolution. It risks giving people who deny the need to take action against climate change a further opportunity to misrepresent the science. The article also notes this may be temporary, as the emergence of drought …

I have appointed myself PR adviser to Tyrannosaurus . The name is rubbish. Tyrants are cruel, arrogant guys who make decent people's life a misery – lots of them are still around, alas. There is zero evidence that T. rex ever did that. All they ever wanted was breakfast, lunch and dinner, and some odd …

Katia Moskvitch is at the firm Quantum Machines (28 March, p 12).

In your Editor's Pick letter titled "Why esoteric science could be overlooked by aliens", the writer thinks that spacefaring aliens might not know about relativity and quantum mechanics because it is so obscure. I beg to differ ( Letters, 28 March ). It is highly likely that advanced species have satellite navigation systems around their …

A thought arising from Daniel Whiteson's article "Would aliens do physics?" is that aliens with "eyes" different from ours might have different ideas about the aftermath of the big bang. If they could perceive longer, infrared wavelengths of light, what we call the cosmic dark ages wouldn't be dark at all. It would be a …

Question: what's worse than going camping with a theoretical physicist? Answer: trusting your accounts to a cosmologist. Not only will most of your cash go missing, but you'll be assured that all is OK; it's really still there, but has simply been transformed into "dark money" ( Letters, 28 March ).

Adrian Smith's imaginary camper virtually identified themselves as a theoretical physicist by displaying such disdain for proven instructions for erecting their tent. As a young oceanographic researcher at a northern UK university in the 1970s, I developed a novel deterministic climate forecasting methodology. When an even younger professor of theoretical physics arrived, I visited his …