In this work the authors study the effects of the geometry and topology of a cylinder on the energy levels of an electron moving in a homogeneous magnetic field. They consider the existence of topological defects as a screw dislocation and a disclination. When they take the region of movement as the full cylindrical surface, they find that, by increasing the strength of the screw dislocation, the dispersion on the electronic energy levels is affected and monotonically increasing.

The authors show the existence of an anticentrifugal force for a quantum particle in a bent waveguide. This effect may be observed in interference experiments which are sensitive to the additional phase of the wavefunction gained in the bent regions and can find application in distinguishing between straight and bent geometries.

It has been suggested that consciousness plays an important role in quantum mechanics as it is necessary for the collapse of wave function during the measurement. Here the authors formulated several predictions that follow from this hypothetical relationship and that can be empirically tested. Experimental results that are already available suggest falsification of these predictions. Thus, the suggested link between human consciousness and collapse of wave function does not seem viable.

The authors study neutron bound states in a particular (1+1)-supersymmetric configuration. A simple physical setup is chosen so that the effective interaction becomes a particular kind of double Dirac delta potential. In this configuration it is shown that the neutron distinguishes between positive and negative electric charge as a consequence of a purely quantum mechanical effect. The theoretical background is presented and a possible application to a real-life physical system is discussed.

An analysis of ground-based observations of solar irradiance was recently published in this journal, reporting an apparent increase of solar irradiance on the ground of the order of 1 % between solar minima and maxima [1]. Since the corresponding variations in total solar irradiance on top of the atmosphere are accurately determined from satellite observations to be of the order of 0.1 % only [2], the one order of magnitude stronger effect in the terrestrial insolation data was interpreted as evidence for cosmic-ray induced aerosol formation in the atmosphere. In the author's opinion, however, this result does not reflect reality. Using the energy budget of Earth's surface, he shows that changes of ground-based insolation with the solar cycle of the order of 1 % between solar minima and maxima would result in large surface air temperature variations which are inconsistent with the instrumental record. It would appear that the strong variations of terrestrial irradiance found by [1] are due to the uncorrected effects of volcanic or local aerosols and seasonal variations. Taking these effects into account, the author finds a variation of terrestrial insolation with solar activity which is of the same order as the one measured from space, bringing the surface energy budget into agreement with the solar signal detected in temperature data.

In his reply the author present a re-analysis of the data of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). For this, a new data reduction method is introduced, allowing a drastic lowering of data scatter, so that the time series of the reduced data clearly shows the ≈︁ 1 % variation of the terrestric solar irradiance in parallel with solar activity. The implications are discussed.