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

A little catty

Feedback’s felines are often nowhere to be seen. For hours at a time – in the case of the more free-range cat, sometimes several days – they vanish from sight. What might they be doing? Torturing the local small-animal population perhaps, or chasing fallen leaves around the yard, or visiting the local school to cause as much disruption to learning as possible, or perhaps just lazing in a warm spot to sleep. But who knows?

One person who does know is at Massey University in New Zealand, because she and her colleagues put collar-mounted accelerometers on cats to follow their movements. Feedback learned of this from the newspaper, which reported the from the journal Pets on 12 September under the heading “Paws for thought: Science proves your cat really is that lazy”.

Smit’s team tracked 10 indoor pet cats and 18 free-roaming pets, as well as eight cats living semi-outdoors in research facilities. Their behaviours were grouped into eight categories: “active (walking and trotting), eating, grooming, littering, lying, scratching, sitting, and standing”. Presumably the data was insufficiently granular to capture other cat behaviours such as “pushing breakable objects off furniture onto hard floors” and “inexplicably hissing at one’s human after having previously been pleased with a cuddle”.

The most mobile cats were free-roaming pets: in summer, they were active a full 3.9 per cent of the time, though this fell to 2.7 per cent in winter. The indoor and research cats spent even less active time. Littering and scratching took up very little time, less than 1 per cent each. Instead, overall, the cats devoted between 2.4 and 7.8 per cent of their time to eating, 4.6 to 7.9 per cent to grooming, and 9.3 to 15.6 per cent to standing.

If you’ve been keeping track, you already know there’s a whole lot of day left. This the cats reserved for their two primary activities. Sitting occupied them for 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time, while a whopping 34.8 to 52.9 per cent went to the really important one: lying.

Feedback would say something about this, but first we’re going to lie down for 4 to 6 hours.

Truncations, extended

Feedback is on a quest to compile a definitive database of unfortunate abbreviations triggered by technological systems, such as the “suggested follow” box on social media that shortened the name of the Stroke Association charity by eight letters. Two more have come our way.

Some years ago, writer Dave Appleby was delighted to have been promoted to assistant headteacher. Soon after, “I applied to attend a conference and proudly filled in my new title on the form where it asked for ‘job role’. ” But Dave was in for a rough experience. “Arriving at the venue, I spent the day meeting other attendees with the name badge pinned to my chest: Dave Appleby, Ass Head.” Fortunately, no pupils were present.

Meanwhile, Mike Petty sent us a one-sentence email we will simply reproduce in full because we have nothing to add (and anyway, adding material seems contrary to the spirit of the exercise). “When I and colleagues set up in business in 1997 as Loughborough Surface Analysis Ltd, little did we realise that for many years to come the default length for the organisation-name field on conference name-badges would be 25 characters [including spaces].”

Into the wild

It has been over a year since Feedback last checked in on MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber on account of having worked very hard to become popular. Wondering what he might be up to these days, we discovered he has started a

The tech giant announced on 2 September that MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) is “tapping into Gemini to help him execute wilder concepts, showing his fans how they can use AI to help turn impossibly big ideas into reality”.

Gemini, of course, is Google’s own-brand AI tool. In MrBeast’s using Gemini, he and his wife, friends and colleagues split into three teams and race across the Amazon (not all of it), the Arctic (likewise) and a desert to reach rescue helicopters. They use Gemini to help them identify hazards and come up with ways to survive.

By the way, while the official announcement mentions the Arctic, the video repeatedly says that the people in the chilly place were in the Antarctic, so Feedback isn’t entirely clear which end of the planet they went to. Details, amirite?

Anyway, a little over 5 minutes into the 23-minute video and didn’t find any instances of them using Gemini. At this point we had got so bored of the constant updates on how far each team had got that we stopped watching.

Our main interest in the video came about due to the by Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, claiming the odds were higher than 10 per cent that AI would “kill all humans” in the next decade.

Extrapolating, we wondered whether MrBeast’s Gemini video might be his last. However, it was titled “I Survived The Most Extreme Places On Earth”, so we assume he made it. However, if his Google deal requires him to make 10 or more videos, the odds are against him.

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

Quantum jam

The history of popular music is, in part, a history of technology. From George Beauchamp inventing the electric guitar to whoever came up with the wobble bass that was briefly ubiquitous in dubstep, what we listen to has been shaped by inventive engineers.

Feedback was therefore intrigued to receive a tip-off from reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan about “music-making on the future quantum Internet”. Karmela directed our attention to published on 5 August called “Teleportation game: Quantum teleportation in multi-agent systems for interactive music”. It was published in a scientific journal with the gloriously all-encompassing title International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems.

It sees the researchers introduce “an interactive music system with quantum musical agents that communicate by teleporting quantum states to one another”. Basically, you play a musical phrase or piece and the recording is given to a set of quantum computers. They then process it in some quantum way and output a modified version of the recording.

Feedback isn’t going to pretend to understand what the quantum computers are doing. The paper informs us that “melodic and rhythmic behaviours are encoded as quantum states using Single Qubit Probability Amplitude Modulation (SQPAM) and structured through Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE)”, and that up to three agents “are combined within a single quantum circuit, with directed communication via quantum teleportation”.

Curious to know who came up with this, Feedback looked up the lead author.
is a composer and computer scientist who has created music using everything from brain-computer interfaces to slime moulds and, latterly, quantum computers. In 2024, he released an album called , entirely created using quantum computers.

Feedback listened to a couple of tracks and was mildly bemused. Opener Lumina Grooves 1 is built around cheery xylophone-like notes: it sounds like something you would hear in an elevator or, perhaps, as background music for a wildlife documentary about marine invertebrates. In contrast, Spinnings uses eerie mechanical groans and could be an off-cut from the soundtrack to Blade Runner 2049.

We really wanted to know what the quantum musical agents in the new paper came up with, but the study doesn’t include any audio, so we don’t know. However, Feedback did note that the authors developed the agents to support “ambiguous, transformative interactions reminiscent of free Jazz improvisation” and that their system is one “in which divergence and ambiguity are tolerated”. To crib a line from the late, great Tom Lehrer, we think this means the quantum agents play a wrong note every now and then.

Quantum computing may be facing a replication crisis

A review of thousands of scientific papers about quantum computers finds that most don’t provide code that can be tested on independent devices or that the code doesn’t work

Quality water

Jonathan Stoppi was driving around Canada when he spotted, and photographed, a van belonging to a local business. It was advertising water, but not just any water. This water offers “superior hydration”. At first, we thought this meant it was wetter than other water, but there was more blurb to come.

It turns out this water is better than other water because it is “alkaline”, “anti-oxidant” and “hydrogen-rich”. This made Feedback’s head spin, because the defining feature of acids is that they release lots of hydrogen ions, also known as protons. We are therefore unclear how this water can be both hydrogen-rich and alkaline. We are also unclear how water can be an antioxidant.

Fortunately, there was a breadcrumb trail for us to follow. The vehicle in Jonathan’s photo had a URL on it, which Feedback bravely typed into our browser. It led us to a website about “Kangen Water”, which, as well as seemingly being hydrogen-rich and all the other stuff, also has a “negative ORP” – something that is apparently “preferred for oral consumption”. Deeper into the site, we learn that “This electrolytically-reduced, hydrogen-rich water works to restore your body to a more alkaline state, which is optimal for good health”.

We were also told that “Kangen Water may give freshness and life to plants”. Feedback wonders if that is the most load-bearing “may” ever written.

Then, a faint memory flickered in our mind. Scouring past columns, we realised we had written about the supposed health benefits of “alkaline water” as early as 2011,
��revisited the topic in 2012 and delved into the health benefits of “hexagonal water” earlier this year (28 March). This had faded from our consciousness, but not, it seems, from the minds of those eager to sell you overpriced water.

How much water do you really need to drink to keep your brain sharp?

Water is essential for good brain function, with a handful of convincing studies suggesting that dehydration could be slowing you down, cognitively speaking. Columnist Helen Thomson explores how much water we should be drinking to stay sharp

Quality assurance

In our 12 August missive, we noted an embarrassing incident that befell the Stroke Association charity. Their name was truncated by a “suggested follow” box on social media, which didn’t have enough space for the “ociation” bit, creating an unfortunate two-word phrase.

Reader Pete Lloyd was reminded of a reorganisation at his workplace, which resulted in one of his friends becoming the quality assurance manager. The organisational chart didn’t have enough space to display three such long words, however, so the HR team abbreviated it by removing the “urance” and the “ager”. “I felt compelled to tell him so he could ask HR to update the chart,” says Pete.

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

Archaeologists RIP

In July, Feedback reported that geologist characters in movies were surprisingly likely to die, often from “work related” causes like volcanic eruptions, but remarkably frequently by murder. We wondered how other scientists fared.

Andrew Hardwick flags The Avengers – not the Marvel superheroes, but the British spy series from the 1960s. “Any character introduced as a scientist was certain to be killed off,” Andrew says, due to the limited budget for hiring guest actors. “Exposition characters had to double up as victims or villains.” Feedback briefly considered performing an analysis to estimate the scientist death toll, but then we learned that the show ran for 161 hour-long episodes and decided we had better things to do.

Meanwhile, David Hawke pulls us up on a detail. We claimed that one indicator a character will die is that he is played by Sean Bean. David argues that Bean’s breakout role was the heroic Richard Sharpe, in the TV adaptations of Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels. While some of Bean’s characters “meet their doom”, David says, “surely playing Sharpe more than compensates for this”. Feedback feels David underestimates just how often Bean dies on screen. A spanning 1986 to 2016 shows him meeting his maker no fewer than 24 times.

However, our main focus here is a missive from Andy Chapman. “As a now retired archaeologist I feel fortunate to have made it this far,” he writes, “given the film death rate for archaeologists.” They are particularly likely to die in films involving Egyptian mummies. “Here the death rate must approach 100 per cent, with only the heroic/romantic leads exempted, but often not their trusted assistants.”

Andy’s argument rests in part on the Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider films, alongside the various incarnations of The Mummy. Andy notes “an unhealthy death rate” in many of these franchises, albeit with a caveat. “Much of this would apply to people unlikely to be regarded as qualified archaeologists, as I don’t believe training in weapons and explosives feature on the syllabus of many archaeology departments.”

Andy’s more sedate approach to the field appears to have kept him safe. He spent his time “working largely in British commercial archaeology ahead of quarrying and construction projects”, which tended to yield less treasure or cursed swords, and more “boxes of broken pottery and animal bone”. Such finds, informative as they are, “don’t often lead to homicide”.

Reprogram yourself

Feedback is feeling a bit wiped out from the alleged “summer holidays”, which just mean we have to work while also ferrying Feedback Jr to their various social engagements. So we wanted a wellbeing hack, and reader Graham Lansdell was on hand to tell us about one. Through a convoluted sequence of events, Graham had become aware of GEOTRAN, “a coding language for the inner bio-computers”.

Promisingly, the official website that “GEOTRAN is a numeric-geometrical dialect which speaks directly to the body’s information fields (memory fields). It works similarly to entering new information into a computer system. By erasing subconscious, self-sabotage, and de-stressing blockages resulting from personal beliefs, early childhood programming, fears, and traumatic experiences, you can reformat for a better life!”

This sounded like just the ticket. Feedback could do with a bit of mind-body reprogramming to regain our usual mild levels of vim and vigour. So we .

We learned that, unlike conventional binary computers, “The GEOTRAN language uses twelve digits (1 through 12)”. Apparently, “these number codes create the actual instructions for the field to make a correction to the existing programming. The geometry locates the place where the dysfunction is stored, and the number makes the correction.”

It seems that GEOTRAN instructions must be “entered at specific points, called ‘spin points,’ on and around the body”. These instructions are then “fed to the heart/mind which has 7 layers or 7 different functions. The heart/mind distributes this information to 12 rings that operate somewhat like a CD, which also holds coded data that is read by light.”

Alas, due to our exhaustion, Feedback was unable to comprehend the instructions. In a bid to hack our system, we tapped our arm a few times to see if it helped, but so far it hasn’t.

It’s a gas

In our quest for ever-more-niche scientific tourist attractions, we keep finding museums dedicated to gas. Upon reading our item about Fakenham Gasworks Museum (1 August), Daphne Tighe experienced a stirring memory. “I was at grammar school 1940-1945 when there was not much scope for exciting outings,” she tells us. “One I remember was arranged by the science teacher to Horsham gas works.” Daphne has no plans to visit any of the modern equivalents, because “I can still remember the smell”.

Meanwhile, Chris Kendall tells us about Leicester, UK, home to the National Gas Museum. Its website claims it is “the world’s largest and most significant gas history collection”, and also that it is shut until 22 September 2026. “Is it any good, you ask?” says Chris. “I don’t know. Despite being a short walk from where I live, I’ve never been interested enough to go and see.”

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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.

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.”

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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.

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

Scratch that

When news editor Alexandra Thompson sent Feedback some research about the social science of long fingernails, a paper that runs to 20 pages, we knew we had to read it. Never mind Alex’s remark – “I don’t think long fingernails is that deep” – Feedback was delving in.

The has the delightfully verbose title “From status symbol to polysemous sign: Interpreting the meaning of artificially extended fingernails”. Wondering why people sometimes wear “artificially elongated fingernails” and how this behaviour is interpreted by the rest of society, the authors examined 45 newspaper articles and identified “eight interpretive frames” through which we can understand the trend for super-long nails.

Some of what is happening can be traced back to Thorstein Veblen’s classic analysis The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions (1899). Veblen posited that the ruling class are engaged in “conspicuous leisure” in order to differentiate themselves from those doing actual work. One way to do that is to grow your nails really long, or wear nail extensions, to signal that you don’t have to work with your hands. However, the authors of the study don’t think that is what’s going on today.

They say that “the clear legibility of long nails as a symbol of leisure has been lost in contemporary societies”, since nail extensions are now found “on the hands of service workers as well as managers”. Instead, what is happening is frantic innovation in the beauty industry, driven by “capitalist market mechanisms”. This is accelerated by social media, where nail artists show off their most extravagant creations, with the result that “the status of nail work shifts from a routinised service to an autonomous art form whose value lies in complexity, originality and photogenic quality”. And that barely scratches the surface (see what we did there?). Never mind seeing a world in a grain of sand, you can see all of human society in a fingernail.

If we hadn’t enjoyed this paper enough, the citations are a gold mine. We had no idea there was a book called , but we want to hand out some sort of prize to the person who came up with that subtitle.

We also want to point out that the authors of the nails paper missed a trick. The proper use of super-long fingernails is to make really good tapping sounds in ASMR videos. We had to rewrite part of this column at the last minute, so we put on to ease the resulting stress, only to wind up blissing out for half an hour and then writing the remainder in a panic.

A hill of beans

Feedback is pleased that our readers continue to bring us unhelpful units of measurement. Thanks go to Tony Levitt, who was at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, UK, when he found a display explaining what goes into making a wind turbine. Apparently, it “can require over 1000kg of rare earth elements to build (the same weight as 2500 tins of baked beans!)”.

As Tony realised, this will look very different depending on whether the cans contain baked beans or not, and the display doesn’t specify. Tony decided to investigate. “Looking in our kitchen cupboard I found a solitary can, labelled as ‘400g net’, ” he writes. “According to my kitchen scales the combined can and contents actually weighs 468g.” If Feedback’s maths is right (and it frequently isn’t), a full can is about seven times heavier than an empty one. We therefore find ourselves knowing the amount of rare earth elements needed to build a wind turbine, but only to within a factor of seven.

“To be fair to the Sedgwick, it is a great little museum,” adds Tony.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Osbos pointed us to a marine forecast warning of a “rapidly rising swell”, on 6 June by – Te Ratonga Tirorangi. Specifically, “Combined wave heights in eastern offshore waters could reach or exceed the height of the Ohakune Carrot”.

Feedback wasn’t previously aware of the Ohakune Carrot, but we have familiarised ourselves. The small town of Ohakune lies at the heart of a major carrot- and parsnip-growing region, and to commemorate this industry, it has a giant fibreglass carrot standing by the road. The carrot is 7.5 metres tall and may be .

New Zealand readers: is the height of the Ohakune Carrot so generally and universally understood that it can be safely used to convey the heights of dangerous ocean waves?

Gaslit

In our ongoing quest for the science-themed tourist attraction with the most limited possible audience, we mentioned Denmark’s Gas Museum as a place that not many people would want to go to (30 May). This included John Blakey, who alerted us to its existence, but hasn’t actually attended.

But it has competition. Rebecca Ferguson (the professor of learning futures at the Open University, not the actor) and Bill Dickinson both wrote in to tell us about another museum of gas: the in Norfolk, UK.

“I wouldn’t want to gaslight John, but he may have forgotten [it],” writes Rebecca. She adds that “TripAdvisor ranks it fourth of the top attractions of Fakenham – beating both the Chocolate Factory Shop and the ruined abbey”.

Bill says the staff are very friendly, cheerfully turning a blind eye when he inadvertently stayed half an hour after closing time.

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