Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more.
A year in shit
Being New scientist Reader, you are probably smart enough to realize that year-end reviews are written weeks ahead of schedule. This particular opinion was drawn up on December 1st, just as Feedback was preparing to spend 24 days avoiding hearing from Wham's. Last Christmas and try to convince Feedback Jr. to decide what they want as their main gift. Any radically stupid situation that might happen after this date will have to wait until next year.
Indeed, 2025 was rich in everything Feedback is interested in. We learned about such interesting offers as nuclear bombing of the seabed stopping climate change is an idea that goes straight into the “Not Recommended” pile. There was also an attempt to create a truly annoying robot. It was a motorized arm that could pretend to hand you an ice cream cone, only to snatch it away at the last second in various supposedly entertaining ways. Surprisingly, people didn't believe it.
To bring some order to this chaos, we are hereby introducing Feedback awards at the end of 2025, which we will call Backsies unless someone writes in with a better suggestion. The judges (that's us) selected the categories and winners through a rigorous process that definitely didn't involve stickers and darts.
Best scientific abbreviation
Someday Feedback would like to see a study examining the amount of time and energy human society spends coming up with inventive and/or forced shortcuts. We suspect this will result in a loss of global productivity equivalent to two flu seasons and a World Cup final.
Feedback brought attention to this topic after I learned about a “machine learning model that can predict the taste of a chemical based on its molecular structure” called Transformer for taste analysis and recognitionor FART. We were not prepared for the subsequent onslaught abbreviationswhich ranged from a hydrographic project called “Management of Rivers Flowing into the Ocean Kingdoms” (MORDOR) To two instruments on NASA's Mars Perseverance rover called “Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals” (SHERLOC) and “Wide-Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering” (WATSON) – although this is a hoax.
Despite this, the judges (ourselves) were unanimous that the award should go to geneticists who have come up with “a method of estimating mutation rates and recent demographic history from very large samples.” They called it “Distribution of Rare Elements in Large Variation Stocks”, or Doctor Evil. Cool.
The best old new technologies
One of the ills of the modern world is that people think they have invented something new, when in fact they have simply renamed something old. There was a standout winner here: Ugmonk, which released “minimalistic paper case manager“The device is designed to replace online task management systems so you can work offline without the distractions of social media. It consists of several index cards that rest on a wooden block.
Best Extrapolation
There's no doubt about it: Demographers David Swanson and Jeff Thaman took this as the basis for their paper, noting a slight decline in population fertility between 2019 and 2024 and then extrapolating it to the entire world. extinction human species in 2339 (or, with just one additional year of data available, 2415).
Best use of AI
The problem was here choice. Endless, endless choice. We were tempted to give this award to Anthropic, which made it possible Claude run a vending machine in the company's office. Claude started by asking clients to transfer money to the bank account he dreamed of. He then pretended to be a man wearing a blue jacket and red tie. However, this was an internal experiment, so he is disqualified.
Instead, this award goes to AI music. The most famous fake AI group today. Velvet Sunsetsounds like the cursed love child of Coldplay and the Eagles. There is something inexpressibly perfect about this. After training almost all recorded music, the AI creates the rawest music imaginable.
And finally…
Let's end with something stupid and a little gross. In 2025, Feedback has repeatedly encountered the Scunthorpe problem: the fact that many perfectly harmless words contain sequences of letters that can be offensive in certain contexts – and the problems this causes for online moderation systems.
We came to this after hearing about Virgin money Chatbot objects to the word “virgin”. From there we learned about a student who was unable to set up an email account as his last name was Peacockand about the incident affecting researchers I study sperm whales.
Our favorite example, however, involved a bank's computer server that refused to communicate with the French server named after Asterix characterbecause the word “tits” was there. We chose this option because of reader Nick Brown, who told us this story and suggested that a bank with such a poorly managed server could go bust.
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