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
And inhale…
If you want to succeed in science, it helps to have good ideas, to be good at experiments, and so forth. But what you really need is a knack for a good acronym. If you can come up with a string of words that describes your project, and also abbreviates to form a word, you’re golden.
That’s how we got such gems as the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) and the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR). But, of course, some people force it, capitalising random letters in a desperate bid to get the acronym they want – hence a gloriously tongue-in-cheek BMJ paper from 2014 titled “SearCh for humourIstic and Extravagant acroNyms and Thoroughly Inappropriate names For Important Clinical trials (SCIENTIFIC): Qualitative and quantitative systematic study”.
Hats off, then, to Leif Sieben, Yoel Zimmermann and the other authors of a July study in npj Science of Food. They have created “a chemical language model for molecular taste prediction”: a machine-learning model that can predict a chemical’s taste based on its molecular structure. The researchers trained their model on more than 15,000 compounds, and it learned to predict taste across four categories: sweet, bitter, sour and umami.
It’s all terribly clever. The model is more than 91 per cent accurate and could be used to help design new flavours. So, naturally, the team called it the Flavor Analysis and Recognition Transformer, or FART.
Food technologist Andy Clayton flagged this to us, noting that “despite myself, and its genuine value as a model, I cannot read it without giggling”.
We invite readers to tell us about the silliest acronyms and/or most hopelessly forced attempts at acronyms they have seen in the wild.
No surprises here
Feedback asked readers for examples of “no shit, Sherlock“: scientific studies that take a lot of time and effort to demonstrate something obvious. Your emails have been pouring in ever since.
Maggie Jacobs flags an article in Discover about the psychological benefits of solitude, which refers to a 2023 study. That study explored “whether people benefit from a balance between their daily solitude and social time” and found “no evidence for a one-size-fits-all ‘optimal balance’ “. In particular, when people were spending time alone by choice, there were no ill effects. Or, as Maggie says, “people are happier when they are doing what they want to do”.
As a bonus, the study also used the archaic word “choiceful” as an adjective to convey that people were doing things on purpose, rather than going with something more familiar like “intentional” or “deliberate”, which is definitely a choice.
Meanwhile, Ernest Ager highlighted a piece in The Conversation with the self-explanatory title: “Can you spot a ‘fake’ accent? It will depend on where you’re from“. This may seem obvious, but it’s even more obvious than it sounds. The research the article discusses shows that people from the US, Canada and Australia aren’t as good at detecting fake versions of various British accents as, er, British people are.
Farewell to Tom
Feedback was saddened to learn of the death on 26 July of Tom Lehrer, the mathematician turned satirical singer-songwriter. While The Elements arguably became Lehrer’s best-known song, thanks to generations of desperate chemistry teachers, Feedback has a deep fondness for his satires on nuclear war, like We Will All Go Together When We Go, and his delightfully horrifying love songs, such as The Masochism Tango.
Lehrer released all his music from copyright in 2022 and made them freely available on tomlehrersongs.com, a website Feedback can heartily recommend. It includes many tracks that weren’t on his main albums and are consequently less well-known.
For instance, we weren’t previously familiar with The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist. This was “prompted by the observation that all love songs that actually describe any physical aspect of the beloved limit their compliments to such things as hair, eyes, lips, hands, etc. Physical anthropologists, on the other hand, have a whole arsenal of descriptive adjectives at their disposal.” Hence: “Let me tell you of / The mammal that I love, / She’s lovely, she’s charming, she’s divine. / That ectomorphic, hypsicranial, rufipilous, leptorrhinian / Metriocephalic gal of mine.”
Feedback was also intrigued to learn, via OpalescentOpal on Bluesky, of a stunt Lehrer pulled during his time under conscription in the US Army. Lehrer worked for the National Security Agency and one of the papers he wrote for them is now freely available online. It’s called “The gambler’s ruin with soft hearted adversary” and deals with a long-standing mathematical problem.
At the end of the 1957 paper, there are six references, of which the third is “Lobachevsky, ‘Analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrizations of infinitely differentiable Remannian [sic] manifolds’ (unpublished)”. This is, in fact, not a real mathematical paper, but a joke one used in Lehrer’s “Lobachevsky”, an ode to flagrant plagiarism. He evidently included it as a prank – one that only paid off decades later when the paper was declassified.
Now that, folks, is how to play the long game. So long, Tom.
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