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

Reshape your mind

One of society’s more intractable problems is unnecessary risk-taking behaviour. People do all kinds of silly things, like gambling on horses/prediction markets (delete according to age), or yelling “I love Coldplay” in a crowded biker bar.

Surely it would be better if people just didn’t do these dangerous things. The problem is how to achieve this. Perhaps some sort of public-awareness campaign, perhaps taxes on risky activities and purchases to deter people through price, perhaps a sign on the biker bar door saying “do not pick a fight”.

Or perhaps we could all just put on some shapewear. This is the startling conclusion of a little study in , highlighted to us by news editor Alexandra Thompson while, presumably, giggling like a hyena. The study indicates that wearing shapewear can make us less likely to take risks.

Feedback isn’t normally one for doing anything so responsible as actually reporting the details of an experiment, but in this case we feel readers will demand it. The authors recruited 44 volunteers, who visited the lab on two consecutive days. On one day, each person was asked to wear compressing shapewear; on the other, they were given a loose garment. They were given tests of their interoception: their ability to perceive the internal state of their body, specifically their heartbeat and their gastrointestinal system.

The volunteers were also given a test of risk-taking called the , presented online. They were shown 32 face-down cards and had to choose how many to turn over, with some giving them positive points and others taking points away. Turning over more cards is riskier than turning over just a few.

It turns out that wearing shapewear was associated with more awareness of one’s internal body state, and with less risk-taking behaviour in the card task. The idea is that enhanced interoception gives people more opportunity to pick up on subconscious warning signals.

Feedback is honestly immediately sceptical, not least because the drop in risk-taking was apparent only for the 28 women in the study: the authors interpret this as a male-female difference in the response to compressive shapewear, whereas we suspect that shapewear might not really affect risk-taking after all.

But mostly, we can’t believe that anyone had the idea to do this in the first place. Even if we had somehow inexplicably started researching shapewear, we would never have thought of this in a million years.

Cry me a volcano

Recently, Feedback asked the big questions: are some people more prone to crying when chopping onions than others? Do people who are more sensitive to onions also have a stronger sense of smell? We reported a preliminary study with some early results.

Not that we would ever claim we are doing scientists’ work for them or anything, but based on our mailbox, this is an untapped gold mine of potential findings.

Let’s start with the idea that a better sense of smell might make you more prone to crying over onions, something the study we looked at did not support. Jackie Jones adds further disconfirming evidence. “I lost my sense of smell six years ago following treatment for cancer,” she writes. “Onions, all my life, always made my eyes hurt and run, and they still do with absolutely no sense of smell.”

Likewise, Christine Wolak is surprised “that there is any scientific uncertainty about whether different people are affected differently when chopping onions”. She reports that at family gatherings, if she starts chopping onions, it can make her eyes water so badly that someone else has to take over – inevitably “experiencing no effect at all”. In fact, her eyes are so sensitive to sulphurous chemicals that a hiking trip to the vicinity of the eruption of Kilauea was enough to bring her to tears. “People thought I was so incredibly moved by the experience,” she writes.

Christine offers an intriguing detail: “This has not always happened to me.” Only after she had laser eye surgery did onion-induced tears become a regular occurrence. “I would love to know if these are related.” On a similar note, Guy Cox reports that his late wife was, at first, unaffected by onions, until she had to swap her contact lenses for bifocal glasses and became thoroughly affected. Might contact lenses be protective?

If you don’t have easy access to contact lenses, readers Chris Evans and Jackie Jones, as well as the , all recommend storing your onions in the fridge, at least for a little while before chopping, because cold onions don’t give off the relevant volatile chemicals. Feedback is going to try that and report back.

Different strokes

It’s been a long time since we saw anything relating to the Scunthorpe problem: the fact that innocuous words can contain objectionable letter strings that may confuse moderation systems. However, a new medium for such rudenesses has come to our attention: those little boxes on social media that recommend accounts to follow.

The estimable folks at the , a British charity, found themselves recommended in the “Suggested for you” box on Meta’s Threads. Owing to the small size of the box, however, their name was stripped of the concluding “ociation”, with unfortunate results.

The Stroke Association subsequently : “Just to reiterate: we talk about medical events, not… whatever this is.”

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.

IT is said that history is written by the victors, but who gets to pen the future? For most of the 21st century, that authorial role has been played by tech wizards of Silicon Valley such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Today, they are joined in prophesising and proselytising by OpenAI and its competitors, who promise either a machine utopia or an AI apocalypse – and sometimes both.

As AI models encroach on ever more areas of human endeavour, it is easy to feel that, as mathematician Terence Tao puts it, we have lost control of the narrative. With OpenAI releasing multiple PhDs’ worth of results in one go, it is no wonder that Tao is calling for his colleagues to wrest back authority over what it means to be a mathematician.

This tech-first control of the narrative is further illustrated by the disclosure OpenAI made last month that its AI models had unexpectedly hacked another firm, Hugging Face, during cybersecurity testing. Writing in apocalypse mode, OpenAI called this an “unprecedented cyber incident” and said the firm was taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

In subsequent weeks, other AI firms including Anthropic and Meta have made similar disclosures, suggesting such incidents are widespread across the industry. As the tech firms tell it, these are accidents, and they are now cleaning up their mess. But why are we allowing them to write the story?

AI models are building the future, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us must idly stand by

If a human employee of these companies had hacked another organisation, we would expect a criminal investigation. Uncertainty about the autonomy of AI models, fuelled by the AI firms themselves, seems to have avoided legal consequences thus far. If society was less willing to buy the AI narrative, the outcome could be very different.

At this point, it is hard to deny that the latest AI models are building the future. That doesn’t mean, however, that the rest of us must idly stand by and watch it happen. In the face of world-shaping technology, it should be the world that decides how it is used, not the tech firms.

Watch as a total solar eclipse sweeps across parts of Europe and the Atlantic ocean as the moon passes between Earth and the sun, blocking out sunlight.

Parts of the US and Africa, along with the entire UK and much of Europe and Canada, will see a partial solar eclipse. Thanks to our friends at The European Space Agency (ESA), you can watch their live broadcast, allowing you to experience this rare event from anywhere in the world.

Total solar eclipse tours and cruises

Explore our tours and cruises designed to help you make the most of experiencing awe-inspiring solar eclipses in handpicked locations around the world.

Find out more

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

Bloons and doubloons

This edition of Feedback is an exercise in time travel – in that every item is something from absolutely ages ago that we somehow missed. We would feel guilty, but it is the summer holidays (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and many readers will have half an eye on their errant children, so we thought we could get away with it.

So, cast your minds back to 2008. This, obviously, was the year of the 20th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, . A large amount of research was at this conference, but reporter Matthew Sparkes recently stumbled across a by Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine and Vi Hart. It presents “a general mathematical and algorithmic theory for balloon-twisting structures”.

If you didn’t grasp that, allow us to clarify: it’s about the geometry of balloon animals. The authors develop a mathematical framework that allows them to calculate how many balloons you need to generate a particular shape, whether it is a dog (one) or some complicated polyhedron like a dodecahedron (10). These, naturally, are referred to as “Platonic balloons”.

Throughout the paper, the authors use the term “bloon” to refer to a mathematical entity equivalent to a balloon. Feedback wasn’t clear why this neologism was necessary, until we realised that they were therefore able to refer to a balloon of twice the usual length as a “doubloon”.

Curious to know what the authors had been up to since, Feedback went a-searching. Hart became a science populariser on YouTube, then a senior manager at Microsoft. Meanwhile, Martin and Erik are father-and-son researchers and artists, both fascinated by the mathematics of folding.

Erik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been in New Scientist a lot. Recent papers include “” and ““. More from Erik, please.

Testing times

Continuing on the topic of being very late to things, reader Derek Long flagged a paper from 2018, “ and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial”. It reports on a study called “PArticipation in RAndomized trials Compromised by widely Held beliefs aboUt lack of Treatment Equipoise (PARACHUTE)”.

(Side note: that is a truly excellent scientific acronym. We haven’t had any of those in a while.)

The problem posed is one of evidence. “Parachutes are routinely used to prevent death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft. However, evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes is weak and guideline recommendations for their use are principally based on biological plausibility and expert opinion.” If readers haven’t yet twigged: the paper is satirical, poking fun at the idea that even the most common-sense interventions should be tested in a full randomised controlled trial.

As the authors write: “In seminal work published in the BMJ in 2003, a systematic search by Smith and Pell for randomized clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of parachutes during gravitational challenge yielded no published studies.”

Feedback actually ran across that back in 2004. The authors noted they were “unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention” and suggested that “everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute”. Oof.

Fifteen years later, they did do a trial. This showed that “parachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury”, with the slight caveat that “the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground”. This was helpfully illustrated by a photo of one of the participants jumping, parachute-less, out of a grounded plane. As the authors say: “Our findings should give momentary pause to experts who advocate for routine use of parachutes for jumps from aircraft in recreational or military settings.”

Witty Zwicky

Some concepts can’t be traced back to their origins. One such is the spherical cow joke, which illustrates the difficulties of working with highly simplified and abstract models of complicated, real-world situations. It involves a physicist who figures out how to improve productivity on a dairy farm, but their solution only works for spherical cows in a vacuum. Nobody seems to know who came up with this: the oldest references place it , but the origin stories are all vague and one reference the cows with chickens.

However, another sphere-based physicist joke seems to be older. Feedback has just learned, many decades after the fact, about an insult deployed by Fritz Zwicky, who, in the 1930s, produced some of the first evidence for dark matter. A noted curmudgeon, Zwicky was fond of referring to people he disliked as “spherical bastards”. Such a person is a bastard no matter which way you look at them.

Feedback will be using that from now on. But we also want to know the etymology (if that is quite the term) of spherical bastards, chickens and cows. Any insights welcome.

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.