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.

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 91av 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.

This has to be the strangest August ever, with climate-changed weather making itself felt all over the place. It is also strange because new books are in short supply. That said, the shelves are by no means bare. We have books to recommend to you on everything from octopus ethics and designing the universe to endometriosis and talking to computers. So, whatever you end up doing to refresh and recharge, we’ve got the book for you.

by Daniel Lieberman 

Meaty palaeo? Going veggie or vegan? Eating Mediterranean? Fasting, intermittently or otherwise? Low or high carbs? Enough – before we all lose the plot! Enter Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University who, says his publisher, “tackles this confusion head on with his trademark blend of lively storytelling and myth-busting science”.

As you would expect, Lieberman draws on evolutionary biology, anthropology and physiology to figure out how we are going so wrong. He travels all the way back, moving from what humans evolved to eat through to how fire, farming and industrialisation transformed our diets, and right up to today as we learn how to combine all that history with rigorous medical science. It will be fascinating to see what former 91av staffer Chris Simms makes of it in our review, to be published shortly.

by Jonathan Loh

To know where we are headed, it can help to have a reasonable grasp of where we have been. So, will some big-picture thinking from an independent scholar help? Jonathan Loh’s publishers call his book Life Story a “panoramic history of life, revealing the forces that have shaped our world – and could shape it again”. We move through the rise of Homo sapiens, from foragers to farmers, from the Bronze Age to the industrial revolution, through “hidden patterns linking genetics and language, organisms and states, ecosystems and economies, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse”.

Humans may dominate the planet, but, as machine intelligence gathers pace, is that supremacy only a phase? Loh is a biologist who has worked as a consultant to organisations such the United Nations Environment Programme and WWF on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity, so he should be well placed to build a deep chronicle of the past and lay out his big idea: culture as a form of life. What would that mean in terms of an AI future? We shall see…  

by Xiaochang Li

The idea of talking to machines has been an enduring human fantasy. Divination Engines is a bit of a wild card: author Xiaochang Li, an assistant professor in the department of communication at Stanford University in California, shows her readers how that dream “both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI”. Sneak peaks reveal a book that is no easy read (brace for technical details), but one in which Li manages to explain the origins of what we call natural language processing, as well as the 20^th-century debates between computer scientists, linguists and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology.

She sets out to show how computer speech recognition advanced technology by de-emphasising linguistic meaning in favour of statistical prediction – that is, how researchers gradually abandoned systems that tried to understand human language in favour of workarounds that just predicted patterns in speech and text data. The rest is, as they say, history… and that’s before we even mention search engines, spam filters, content managers and the like. All this comes at the cost of needing more and more new data – forever! This will be a tough read for many of us, but one that’s worth the effort. Oh, and Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI, calls the book “a landmark in the critical history of artificial intelligence”.

by Catherine Heymans

No small ambition in this next book, either. Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans’s latest is, according to its subtitle, no less than a look at the “science of real and virtual worlds”. At its heart is that wonderful, death-defying question: could we be living in a computer simulation, and how would we even know? It all sounds fascinating, as Heymans, the astronomer royal for Scotland, takes us “on a humorous and mind-bending journey through the science of reality itself”.

From subatomic particles and the cosmic mysteries of dark matter to the secrets of the human senses, we are promised an exploration of “whether humanity could ever create a virtual universe as rich and diverse as our own – and what that means for our sense of self, free will and consciousness”. Not much going on here, then.

by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

This is one for all of us who love silvery-grey snow leopards, those fabulous and elusive beasts, which live in the rugged mountains of central Asia, camouflaged against the rocks and cliffs. For the past 20 years, scientist, conservationist and mountaineer Kulbhushansingh (Kullu) Suryawanshi has studied them in the wild, exploring every aspect of their lives from habitat to prey to population – sometimes living for months in the world’s toughest, most remote environments. Suryawanshi, we are promised, has “pioneered new research that shines fresh light on these charismatic and vulnerable animals, showing how their fate is entangled with the local people and how their survival is central to preserving an austere, delicate ecosystem”.

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by Lani Watson

There is something wonderful about books with a single letter as their main title. Q (and here’s the subtitle so we know what we’re talking about: The hidden power of questions in a world that wants answers) is all about the art and science of asking questions, as the only creature on Earth that does so in any formal sense. But we’re trained to look for answers, not how to ask questions – so much so, says author Lani Watson, that we live in an answer-rich, question-poor world.

Yet, as the publishers remind us,” from doctors’ surgeries to courtrooms to dating, the ability to ask questions determines our experiences. In a world obsessed by answers, asking better questions is powerful.”

That sounds very wise, and we should be in good hands: Watson is a philosopher and honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK, as well as a former research fellow at the University of Oxford. Plug into what her publishers call a “captivating narrative from the death of Socrates to the age of AI”, and you will soon learn how to think about the questions you ask and the ones you don’t.

by Richard Schweid

With octopus blooms suddenly appearing in many places, journalist Richard Schweid and publisher University of North Carolina Press could hardly have hit on a more provocative subject. Billed as a “gripping, on-the-ground investigation into the global race to farm octopus and the ethical firestorm it has ignited”, there is clearly a lot to chew on as we explore the “ethics and future of growing the world’s most intelligent invertebrate”.

Among the issues is the fact that, in 2021, the London School of Economics recognised invertebrates such as cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and decapods (crayfish, crabs, lobsters) as capable of experiencing pain, distress and happiness, finding that high-welfare farming of them would therefore be impossible. But the enormous international demand for octopus meat continues to grow, even as wild octopus populations decline. Fishers in the UK’s south-west are already experiencing problems as the vast number of octopuses eat their typical high-value catch: adult lobsters, brown edible crabs, scallops and the like. What to do instead? Eat the octopuses? Apparently, recipes are proliferating… a dilemma indeed.

by Evelyn Scott

This is no less than an exposé of medical misogyny, says the publisher of what looks like a forthright book about endometriosis, A Bloody Scandal: How medicine fails women in pain. There should be a huge market for it, given the sheer number who experience it (it is often said that 1 in 10 women do, but the real figure is probably higher), often in silence and for decades.

Author Evelyn Scott weaves in her own experience of the condition: she was just a teenager when she first had the symptoms of endometriosis. She shares 15 years during which she endured constant, agonising pain – and hopeless ineptitude when seeking support, ranging from dismissals on the grounds of hysteria to misdiagnoses. She felt completely isolated, until she discovered all the other women experiencing the same condition. Powerful stuff and, many will argue, long overdue.

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