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As you say in your Editorial, the government in the UK is unlikely to offer genetically modified crops a crude red or green light (14 June, p 3) . It is the shade of amber that matters – the degree of caution and control placed on the commercialisation of these products. You hint at three …

The jury is out on whether changes in lifestyle will significantly prolong life expectancy (7 June, p 28) . J. R. Johnstone cites three major randomised controlled trials over three decades which failed to show "that healthy lifestyle would increase life expectancy", while Pekka Puska of the World ÎçÒ¹¸£Àû1000¼¯ºÏ Organization maintains that lifestyle interventions "can …

George lives on Cousin island, a beautiful nature reserve in the Seychelles archipelago. He spends his time sleeping, drinking, having sex and breaking the reserve infrastructure. A football hooligan? No, he is just a rowdy giant tortoise. Once thought to be a member of a small group of survivors from the lost continent of Gondwanaland, …

Tom Lockyer's letter is a classic example of how ingrained is the belief that only men are scientists (31 May, p 26) . He concludes that "particle physicists…seem content to maintain the status quo, just to feed their wives and kiddies". And we wonder why women are not entering the sciences!

So, John Barrow has resurrected that hoary old Cartesian chestnut, that the universe is some kind of simulation (7 June, p 44) . There are fundamental problems with his thesis. For a start, applying the predicate "simulated" only makes sense when we know what the genuine thing is like. It makes sense to ask whether …

For God's sake stop printing stories about how the universe is a simulation. Do you want to get us all deleted?

I found the article on "smart" airline seats very troubling (14 June, p 14) . Paul Marks ends this frightening piece with the statement, "first-class passengers will enjoy the benefits first". I don't see the benefit of airlines taking away every ounce of our privacy. I fly frequently, but the latest news I'm hearing is …

A proper recognition of mathematics in the Nobel prizes could easily be achieved if the Norwegian parliament passed a law to modify the rules of the Nobel Foundation. This could add the Abel prize fund to the Nobel fund and award a Nobel prize for mathematics (7 June, p 12) . There are many precedents …

Your article on the lack of a Nobel prize in mathematics fails to mention the reason: namely that one mathematician in particular, it may have been David Hilbert, was exploring more than theoretical spaces with Mrs Nobel, and Alfred was furious.

George Monbiot needs to explain why developing countries that protect themselves through trade barriers end up with inefficient, resource-wasting, state-owned industries that enrich their corrupt elites while impoverishing the wider population (31 May, p 25) . Without external competition there is no incentive for domestic industries to bring quality levels up to international standards. Without …

I believe mortality due to adverse reactions to the anti-cancer drug Iressa in Japan is more than 2 per cent (24 May, p 12) . Investigators in the clinical trials decided that most of the deaths were not related to Iressa. However, after marketing Iressa in Japan, many fatal reactions (more than 246 deaths up …

I was intrigued by your article about the effects of computer games on people's visual skills (31 May, p 11) . While this shows that there could be positive side effects to gaming, the researchers seem not to have investigated any possible negative effects on the visual systems and the brain. As a once regular …

Your report on the development of a robot that will kill weeds (7 June, p 16) mentions that it requires 40 more indigenous broadleaved weed species to be modelled before the system becomes practical. I may be missing something, but wouldn't it be easier to model the limited number of crop species? Having done this, …

In the article on basil extracts in cheese rind (14 June, p 26) , your picture caption states: "The cheese will only go off if the basil's faulty". What if they don't follow the instruction "Manuel"? I think gourmets should be warned – the worst cheese is in the captions.

• Our article "The facts of life" (31 May, p 30) wrongly referred to the bacterium Salmonella typhi as the "typhus bug". As reader Matthew Readwin points out, this bacterium is responsible for a different disease, typhoid fever. Typhus is caused by bacteria of the genus Rickettsia.