Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Observe this listing

Feedback has, belatedly in life, stumbled upon a new life interest: wildly aspirational property choices. We previously highlighted the Farnborough Centrifuge, a piece of aviation and space-flight history now up for sale as a home for someone with £750,000 to burn. The Centrifuge was still available the last time we checked. Now, chief subeditor Kelsey Hayes has identified an even more expensive domicile up for sale, which has been by the news site London Centric. Compared with this, she notes, the Farnborough Centrifuge “now seems like a bargain”.

When Feedback opened the tab , it announced at the top: “Four bedroom detached house for sale”. While this is technically true, it does not quite capture the scale of the property in question.

What is up for sale is the King’s Observatory in Old Deer Park, London. It is a former astronomical observatory, since converted into a private home. It was built on the orders of King George III (as in The Madness of) in the 1760s, so that he and his wife Queen Charlotte (as in Bridgerton) could observe the 1769 transit of Venus. At the time, this was a major scientific endeavour, because it offered a way to determine the distance from Earth to the sun. Evidently the royals wanted to share the excitement.

Careful examination of the listing reveals that the observatory is still operational: one of the photos shows an antique wood and brass telescope housed inside a cupola. Kelsey notes with bemusement that the estate agents do not seem to regard this as a major selling point: “it’s the last photo in the slideshow”.

In the decades after the transit, the observatory was used for an , including measuring atmospheric electricity and verifying the accuracy of instruments such as clocks. In the 1980s, it became offices, and in the 21st century, a private home. The listing describes it as having not a garden, but “grounds”, and a drive that can accommodate the adjective “sweeping”. Grecian carp are mentioned.

At this point, Feedback had heard enough. We were poised to book a viewing when we noticed the asking price: £18 million. We find ourselves a tad short. We could try for a mortgage, but we fear that by definition it would be sub-prime.

London Centric did highlight one potential disadvantage of purchasing the King’s Observatory: “You do, however, have to live in the middle of a golf course.” Readers and their spouses will have their own views as to whether this is a plus or a minus.

Dust to dust

We continue our efforts to compile the most niche science-themed tourist attractions from around the world. In this we have been aided by Brian Reffin Smith, who alerts us to “an exceptional wonder”: the Museum of Dust.

The museum is the creation of artist and author . It’s a , blue on the outside and red inside. It’s divided into eight compartments: two across, four down. Each houses an array of little bottles of dust.

But not just any dust. Sally has gathered samples from around the world. There is dust from the Great Wall of China and from the wrapping of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Another sample comes from yet another museum, the self-explanatory House of Automata. Do not look at photos of the items on display at the House of Automata unless you want to be inspired to write a M3GAN-style horror movie.

Sometimes people send Sally dust, which must surely cause a brief frisson of alarm when she opens the envelope. She has , sent to her in 2013 by a friend who worked on the show. She also has a sample of dust from the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother house, but has not yet revealed how she obtained it.

Readers eager to see the Museum of Dust need to know it has no permanent home: instead you have to attend one of Sally’s . Just try not to sneeze.

Not in a name

Occasionally Feedback likes to throw a spanner in the works. In that spirit, we will highlight some examples of what we might call anti-nominative determinism: that is, people whose names are the opposite of what we might expect given their jobs.

In Queropalca, a remote district of Peru, a was won by a candidate named Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores. That name contains two waving red flags, but, in fact, Hitler Mussolini is a member of the Ahora NaciÓn party, which is on the centre-left.

This sort of thing seems to happen quite a lot in South America. For instance, between 2017 and 2021, the president of Ecuador was one . Elected as a social democrat, he pivoted to – none of which, one feels, the original Lenin would have approved of.

Likewise, reader Hillary Shaw wrote in to highlight another example of inappropriate naming: the 19th-century poet William Jeffrey Prowse. This one took Feedback a moment to understand because we associate the surname Prowse with the actor who embodied Darth Vader, whereas Hillary simply wanted us to read it without the “w”.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Bonita Ely was alarmed to discover that her next cancer check-up was with a “Dr Kilian”.

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The virologist said that “hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality”. Salk was certainly daring – he risked paralysing himself, his wife and their children while testing his polio vaccine. Thankfully, it paid off. None of them experienced any ill effects and his work is credited with .

Risks have to be taken for medicine to advance, and someone is always the first to receive a treatment. But there are risks, and then there are risks.

Salk tested his vaccine on cells, monkeys and children who had already had polio before turning his unexposed family into guinea pigs. His approach is far from standard protocol today, but he did a lot to reduce the risk of something going wrong.

There is less evidence to justify an operation that took place this month in Russia. Details are scant, but the procedure involved cutting out a section of spinal cord from someone with a complete spinal cord injury and gluing in a replacement piece from a donor. The transplant was a world first, but there is little evidence to believe it will have worked or that now was the time to try it.

The transplant was a world first, but there is little evidence to believe it will have worked

History tells us that acting ahead of medical evidence can have catastrophic results. Take the first synthetic organ transplants, which replaced tracheas with plastic tubes. The surgeon who fitted them admitted they hadn’t been tested on large animals because they “didn’t have the time”. .

With new medical procedures, the gold standard is randomised controlled trials, which are costly and take time, but they aren’t the only route. When someone is critically ill, there are compassionate-use protocols that make interventions available before they are fully tested. Pig kidney transplants are currently being trialled this way, for example.

The dream of spinal cord transplants will surely become a reality one day, but only if the science underpinning them is built first. Courage, dreams and imagination are of course good, yet with experimental surgeries, evidence is better.

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Pussycats on parade

Some topics appear to be catnip to Feedback’s readers, and one of them is cats. In our 23 September edition, we described a study in which pet cats were fitted with accelerometers. This revealed that they spent the lion’s share of their time doing absolutely nothing, with 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time spent sitting down and a further 34.8 to 52.9 per cent devoted instead to lying down.

We suggested that these cats were a tad slothful, and might even be edging towards idleness.

We received some feedback on this opinion. Reader Jack Haley sent us a lengthy text “courtesy of Google AI” (put a pin in that; we’re coming back to it), recounting the experiences of , a geologist in Australia who took part in a in the 2010s.

The results, as outlined in Haley’s text, were startling: “Squid, a heavier ginger tabby, was mapped taking regular nighttime strolls to the local high school and a nearby shopping center. Semi, a black- and-white cat, went much further, venturing a staggering three kilometers away from home.”

Furthermore, “Studies like the Cat Tracker project have shown that roughly 40 per cent of cats whose owners believe they are indoors or close by at night actually range over a hectare or more, frequently engaging in secret, long-distance neighbourhood explorations.”

Curious, Feedback put our exploring paws on and eventually found that the was launched from the University of North Carolina before being in Australia (and there’s now a Cat Tracker 2.0). Its final results were in 2020 in Animal Conservation. “We worked with citizen scientists to track 925 pet cats from six countries, finding remarkably small home ranges,” the feline watchers wrote. The average range was “3.6 hectares” (0.036 square kilometres) and in the sample only three cats ranged over more than 1 square kilometre.

Readers may notice some subtle differences between how the AI framed the results and how the scientists did. Technically, if you think about it, the AI did get the core facts right, and yet, Feedback still thinks cats are quite lazy.

Meanwhile, assistant news editor Sam Wong sent us a study titled “Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries”. This found that “national happiness was positively associated with cat density”.

They mean “population density”, of course, but Feedback is also pretty sure that cats with greater physical density have significant effects on the happiness of their human attendants. One of ours can contract until she has a density approximating that of a neutron star when she wants to sleep on one of her humans.

Raging hellfire

A lot of lectures suffer from a dire lack of relatability. What, a prospective audience might wonder, does the evolutionary divergence of Cambrian lophotrochozoans or a drag-induced skin effect in a Bose-Fermi mixture have to do with my life?

No such relatability limitations affected a on 8 October at Utah State University by Miranda Judson, a graduate student in philosophy at Arizona State University. The organisers noted that a announcing it had unexpectedly gone viral – and it’s no wonder.

The talk was titled “Welcome to Hell: A theodicy”. The subtitle went on to clarify that “This talk argues that the evidence of our world is such that the probability we’re in hell is surprisingly high. If we’re in hell, we’d expect to see the evidence we actually do see”.

Alas, the talk wasn’t streamed online, and Judson doesn’t appear to have yet published a paper on it. But honestly, given the general state of things, we feel it wouldn’t be too difficult to fill in the blanks. We’ll report back if we learn more, hopefully not via the medium of a demonic voice in our head.

Bedtime tales

Speaking of evidence that we’re in hell, readers may have heard of the AI engineer telling his wife that he doesn’t need to read to his kids at bedtime because he can just train an AI to do it for him. If you haven’t heard of this, well, now you have.

The engineer in question is Alvin Sng, who works for a company called Factory. Sng the following on X on 7 October: “My wife: Can you read our baby a book? Me: I can just play an audiobook from my phone. My wife: But then it won’t be in your voice. Me: I can train a voice model.” His conclusion was: “Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”

Feedback isn’t going to dunk on this, because a large proportion of the people with access to the internet already have, and at this point it’s too easy. However, we will note that Sng has since deleted the post, and on 8 October : “Ok, enough jokes for a while. I’ll go back to reading bedtime stories for now.” The replies to this post suggest that people don’t believe he was joking.

The trouble is, of course, that the claims routinely made by AI bros are so over the top that it is hard to differentiate a parody from the real thing. The internet adage Poe’s law describes this phenomenon for extreme views, which are frequently so ridiculous that any parody must be clearly marked as such.

Perhaps we need a corollary, something like: “Without a blatant display of humour, it is utterly impossible to parody antisocial AI hype in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for the genuine article”. We could call it Sng’s law.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.