The blue whale: the world’s most versatile measuring stick?

Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com

Whales not Wales

Feedback has been a science journalist for more years than we care to remember, and as a result we have come across our fair share of bizarre units of measurement. The human mind struggles with the very large and the very small, so as a writer it is tempting to say that huge icebergs have an area that is X times the size of Wales, or a mountain is Y times the height of the Burj Khalifa, or a bad book contains Z times more plot holes than Fourth Wing.

In this spirit, Christopher Dionne wrote in to highlight a CNN article about the Blue Ghost lunar lander sending its final message from the moon. He notes that the writer tries to convey the amount of data the probe sent by saying it “beamed a total of about 120 gigabytes of data — equivalent to more than 24,000 songs — back to Earth”.

“This got me thinking,” says Dionne. Nowadays a lot of music is streamed, so the size of the song files “doesn’t generally matter”. The size of the files will also vary depending on the compression method, and on a song’s length. We can surely all agree that All Too Well (10-minute Version) is going to be a slightly larger file than Love Me Do – so you can’t use songs as a standardised unit of dataset size.

Happily, Dionne has come up with a solution. “Why don’t we use the internationally agreed upon standard of measurement – the blue whale?” The blue whale genome is 2.4 billion bases in length. “So it seems that the Blue Ghost has sent back 50 blue whales of data from the moon.”

Feedback likes the idea, partly because we enjoy the Douglas-Adams-esque image of a torrent of whales hurtling to Earth from the moon. But we are going to quibble Dionne’s maths. A base in a genome isn’t equivalent to a byte in a dataset. Each byte is eight bits, and it is the bits that are analogous to bases. DNA isn’t binary, either: there are four possible choices (A, C, G or T) for each position in the genome. That means you can encode a byte using half as many bases as bits. So, multiply by 8 and divide by 2, and we think Blue Ghost sent back about 200 blue whales.

We encourage readers to submit, as Dionne suggests, “other comparative units of digital measurement… which may be even better at communicating the scale of information”, and we look forward to “a thoughtful discourse around this most pressing issue”.

Goodbye, Alice and Bob

Few things are more likely to kill a joke than the need to meticulously explain it. So Feedback is a bit nervous about this one, since it involves both a topical event and a cryptographic in-joke.

Let’s start with the cryptography thing, because we think this is the one readers might need a refresher on. When explaining how secure messaging systems work, it has become traditional to refer to the two main agents as “Alice” and “Bob”. For example: “How can Alice send a secure message to Bob using the Signal messaging app?”

The names have been in use since 1978 and are so widespread they have their own Wikipedia page. As well as describing the history of the device, this page delineates the hugely extended list of additional characters that can become involved in these thought experiments: from Chad, “a third participant, usually of malicious intent” all the way to Wendy, “a whistleblower”.

Basically, if you are a regular New Scientist reader, you will probably have read stories that used Alice and Bob (and their friends/enemies/acquaintances/lovers) to explain complicated ideas in cryptography and physics. You are familiar with this. Parodies of it are therefore amusing.

We aren’t going to bother naming the relevant news event. It was widely covered and discussed. Although, who knows: we are writing this on 27 March, so by the time you read this you might have forgotten about it, because the news moves so fast these days. Maybe the US has invaded Svalbard in the interim because Donald Trump forgot which Arctic landmass he wanted.

Anyway, here we go. Posting on Bluesky, software developer John VanEnk shared a screenshot of a Wikipedia page. It read: “Hegseth and Waltz are fictional characters commonly used as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic systems and protocols, and in other science and engineering literature where there are several participants in a thought experiment. The Hegseth and Waltz characters were created by Jeffrey Goldberg in his 2025 article ‘The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans’. Subsequently, they have become common archetypes in many scientific and engineering fields…” This was accompanied by a diagram, described as an “example scenario where communication between Hegseth and Waltz is intercepted by Goldberg”.

If, after all that buildup, you didn’t find it funny, Feedback encourages you to send your comments to our Signal account, which we don’t have.

What a lark

Readers Patrick Fenlon and Peter Slessenger both wrote in to highlight the same article in The Guardian, on how migrating birds use quantum mechanics to navigate. Apparently most “migrate at night and by themselves, so they have no one to follow”, according to a biologist quoted in the article. Her name is Miriam Liedvogel, which of course means “songbird”.

As Fenlon put it: “Wunderbar”.

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