Feedback is 麻豆传媒鈥檚 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鈥�
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鈥檙e golden.
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That鈥檚 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 鈥� hence a gloriously tongue-in-cheek BMJ paper from 2014 titled 鈥� and Thoroughly Inappropriate names For Important Clinical trials (SCIENTIFIC): Qualitative and quantitative systematic study鈥�.
Hats off, then, to Leif Sieben, Yoel Zimmermann and the other authors of a in npj Science of Food. They have created 鈥渁 chemical language model for molecular taste prediction鈥�: a machine-learning model that can predict a chemical鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渄espite myself, and its genuine value as a model, I cannot read it without giggling鈥�.
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 鈥�no shit, Sherlock鈥�: 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 , which refers to a 2023 . That study explored 鈥渨hether people benefit from a balance between their daily solitude and social time鈥� and found 鈥渘o evidence for a one-size-fits-all 鈥榦ptimal balance鈥� 鈥�. In particular, when people were spending time alone by choice, there were no ill effects. Or, as Maggie says, 鈥減eople are happier when they are doing what they want to do鈥�.
As a bonus, the study also used the archaic word 鈥渃hoiceful鈥� as an adjective to convey that people were doing things on purpose, rather than going with something more familiar like 鈥渋ntentional鈥� or 鈥渄eliberate鈥�, which is definitely a choice.
Meanwhile, Ernest Ager highlighted a piece in The Conversation with the self-explanatory title: 鈥溾��. This may seem obvious, but it鈥檚 even more obvious than it sounds. The research the article discusses shows that people from the US, Canada and Australia aren鈥檛 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鈥檚 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 , a website Feedback can heartily recommend. It includes many tracks that weren鈥檛 on his main albums and are consequently less well-known.
For instance, we weren鈥檛 previously familiar with . This was 鈥減rompted 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.鈥� Hence: 鈥淟et me tell you of / The mammal that I love, / She鈥檚 lovely, she鈥檚 charming, she鈥檚 divine. / That ectomorphic, hypsicranial, rufipilous, leptorrhinian / Metriocephalic gal of mine.鈥�
Feedback was also intrigued to learn, via , 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鈥檚 called 鈥溾�� and deals with a long-standing mathematical problem.
At the end of the 1957 paper, there are six references, of which the third is 鈥淟obachevsky, 鈥楢nalytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrizations of infinitely differentiable Remannian [sic] manifolds鈥� (unpublished)鈥�. This is, in fact, not a real mathematical paper, but a joke one used in Lehrer鈥檚 鈥淟obachevsky鈥�, an ode to flagrant plagiarism. He evidently included it as a prank 鈥� 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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