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

Stony ground

When you start watching a film, there are some characters you can confidently predict will die. A minor character joining two major characters for an action sequence? Dead to illustrate the stakes. Wise old mentor in an epic fantasy? Sure to die at the end of act two.

Feedback knows these cliches and more, but it hadn’t previously occurred to us to consider geologists as being at risk. Nevertheless, it turns out they have a life expectancy only marginally better than characters played by Sean Bean.

We learned this from a delightful . Geologist Erik Sturkell at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues have amused themselves over the past decade or so by compiling examples of geologists in films: who are they, how are they portrayed and what tends to happen to them?

Sturkell’s team has now documented “141 movies, spanning the period 1919–2023 and starring 202 geologists”. It turns out geologists mostly appear in films centred on adventure, drama, action and science fiction. “Geologist movies are rarely comedic,” write the researchers. Only 11 per cent of movie geologists are female, though this has apparently picked up a bit since the 1990s. Furthermore, cinematic geologists are, if not consistently heroic, “at least not guilty of any professional misconduct”.

And yet they are frequently rubbed out. “Geologists die at an alarming rate in the movies, often very early on,” the authors write. Depending on the decade, the death rate varies between 31.6 and 35.7 per cent. Of the 202 geologists, 69 die, 30 by murder. The authors cite the 1967 film The Money Jungle, which Feedback hasn’t seen, but which involves multiple oil companies scheming for control of a rich field. During this unseemly squabble, five geologists are murdered, mostly by creative means, “such as being electrocuted by a golf cart, poisoned when taking medicine, gassed by the fireplace and killed when his toy train explodes”. This, the authors note, is “the worst serial slaughter of geologists in any movie”.

Across the years, a further 12 geologists died of “work related” causes, such as “being hit by a volcanic bomb, falling into a crater or an opening fault, drowning in quicksand or lahar, and incineration in an oil pit”. Equally common are deaths involving extraterrestrials, such as the geologist in Prometheus who is assimilated by aliens and “consequently killed by former colleagues”.

This is all fascinating, but Feedback finds ourselves consumed by follow-up questions. What are the cinematic death rates for other branches of science? We can’t help but suspect that palaeontologists must be absolutely getting it in the neck, because they only show up in stories where extinct creatures come back to life and start eating people. On the other hand, movie solid-state physicists are probably having a pretty chill time.

Can anyone point us to a dataset?

Me, me, me

Feedback is alarmed to learn that the lyrics of pop music have become significantly more self-centred over the past few decades.

This is true in the US and Germany, according to a study in PLoS One, which each year from 1970 to 2019. The analysis revealed an increase in the use of first-person singular words like “I”, “me” and “mine”, compared with first-person plural words like “we” and “ours”. Curiously, this didn’t occur in Japan and Hong Kong, which the study describes as “more collectivist”.

The paper treats this in near-apocalyptic terms, noting that “contemporary societies are increasingly self-focused, as reflected in levels of greed, narcissism, and social disconnection”.

Feedback certainly isn’t going to mount a “greed is good” defence, but we do have questions. For starters, how much of the trend is driven by the highly entrepreneurial US, as opposed to the more moderately capitalistic Germany? Second, how much of the increase in “me” words can be explained by the rise of solo artists and the total collapse of bands? Do K-pop groups – at this point basically the only remaining successful bands – also exhibit this egotistical trend?

She’ll be back

Last month, Âéśš´ŤĂ˝ reviewed the book We Are Not Machines: The fight for the future of work, which argues that artificial intelligence is not exactly coming for our jobs, but rather that our jobs are being contorted to fit AI (20 June). The result is that jobs that were once interesting are becoming boring and companies’ products and services are getting worse.

Readers Ian Williams and Erik Foxcroft both got in touch to flag the spooky near-coincidence that the book’s author, a journalist at the Financial Times, is named Sarah O’Connor. “O, how close to perfection,” says Erik.

Having a name that is almost but not quite that of the lead human character in The Terminator has previously caused ripples. In 2015, O’Connor was the FT‘s employment correspondent and : “A robot has killed a worker in a VW plant in Germany.” The combination of seeming cyborg-murderer news and O’Connor’s name went viral. The irony was that . Feedback assumes she has since watched it, and hopes she concluded her book with a three-word promise of a sequel.

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.

A problem shared is a problem halved, or so the saying goes. That is the philosophy of the open-source software movement, which sees volunteers coming together to code, patch and improve software tools.

The approach has been a huge success: most computing devices, including closed commercial machines like Windows PCs or Apple iPhones, use some open-source software. But while openness has benefits – having many eyes on code makes it easier to find and fix bugs – there are risks, too.

Open-source software intended to pilot consumer drones is now being used to guide a cheap Ukrainian cruise missile. Traditionally, military tech is custom-built, restricted and expensive. Ukraine has shown this needn’t be the case in the war with Russia: as Âéśš´ŤĂ˝ has reported, cheap consumer drone technology is helping Ukraine hold back the invasion.

But while many readers may cheer on Ukraine’s fight, the fact that anyone can now download a cruise-missile guidance system should give us a moment’s pause.

Open-source models have fewer guardrails and the ones that exist are easier to remove

Open source is also key to another war, though this time a commercial one. In the US, AIs like ChatGPT use mostly private codebases, with access sold for a monthly fee. In China, however, open-source models lead the way. These are generally a few months behind the US models in capability – but anyone with the necessary hardware can download and run them for free.

While the closed US models generally come with guardrails to prevent chatbots from spewing out harmful material, open-source models have fewer such limits and the ones that exist are easier to remove.

That creates headaches for attempts to regulate AI models, such as testing them for national security risks before release, as was recently suggested by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. But it also offers the opportunity for more people to find ways of using AI models that US tech firms may not have thought of.

Open source means problems can be shared – it’s just that some will get easier to solve, while others get much harder.

Feedback is Âéśš´ŤĂ˝â€™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

Imagining things

Late last year, between one news event and another (honestly, who can remember?), Feedback was delighted to discover the . This is an online magazine publishing “short works of fiction”, but only if they take the form of “imaginary research abstracts”. In other words, it’s a collection of summaries of (entirely fictional) research studies, each of which is a little short story in disguise.

It’s the creation of two academics in the UK: at the University of Glasgow and at the University of Derby. It grew out of a workshop intended “to introduce creative writing concepts to researchers”, especially those “who felt tense, anxious, about writing, or had fallen into a negative relationship with their writing” – in other words, an aid for professionals with writer’s block. But, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has grown beyond all expectations and is now a venue for rather lateral short stories.

The came out in late June. Reader Alex Gough alerted us to it, having published in it himself “after strenuous peer review”. Alex’s piece is titled “Seven new examples of adaptive radiation and insular dwarfism in etapods”. He begins by explaining that “Insular dwarfism is a process in which species isolated on islands evolve to become smaller than their mainland counterparts, eg Lemerle’s hippopotamus.” From there he goes on to describe seven miniature species from a fictional archipelago, each of which has “developed behavioural traits suited to [its] unique environment”.

For instance, “Etapodus malevolus is notably belligerent”, in response to “the high prevalence of predators on its island”. In contrast, “Etapodus somnolentus undergoes prolonged periods of hibernation to cope with its irregular food supply.”

However, not all the species could be explained in this kind of adaptive evolutionary language. “Etapodus jucundus is habitually carefree and contented, for reasons we have not yet discovered.”

We assume readers have got the joke by now. If not, go sweep the floor and whistle while you work, maybe it’ll become clear.

Elsewhere in the issue, we find “Move fast and break everything: Deflecting anxiety in a tech-forward world”. It explains: “For unclear reasons, the rapid-fire continuous release of life-altering and world-transforming technological developments in artificial intelligence, without oversight of any kind, has caused an increase in anxiety, with some people even proving inexplicably resistant to emerging technologies.”

Fortunately, a solution is at hand. “The use of AI technologies reduces prefrontal cortex activity and critical thinking”, which may lead to “brain atrophy, and therefore a reduction in distracting ethical questions”. The problem solves itself!

Etymological issues

Feedback is on a mission to get the word “nonomatopoeia” added to the dictionary. Attentive readers will recall that the neologism was proposed by Neil McKay and means the opposite of onomatopoeia, i.e. it is a word that doesn’t sound at all like the thing it describes.

Several readers have submitted additional examples of nonomatopoeia, bolstering the evidence that the word would be a valuable addition to the language because it describes a widespread phenomenon. Elaine Coates says she has always struggled with “pedagogy”. It refers to the method and practice of teaching, but, she says, “it sounds like some sort of foot fetish”.

Likewise, Bob Munro nominates “valetudinarian”. It sounds like a religious order, but actually refers to “a person who is chronically sick, or believes themselves to be”. These two alternative meanings, incidentally, are so radically distinct they render the word effectively useless.

In a nicely meta twist, Sue Tudor says that “onomatopoeia” is itself an example of nonomatopoeia. She describes “onomatopoeia” as “surely one of the most non-onomaterwhatsit words in existence”, because the sequence of syllables suggests “standing or sitting on a mat on a pier”.

There is, we should say, a question about the etymology of nonomatopoeia, which computer scientist has flagged. “May I be the 94th reader to point out that onomatopoeia is Greek, so its negation is anonomatopoeia, not nonomatopoeia,” he writes. “The opposite, rather than the negation, is antonomatopoeia.”

We regret to inform Julian that he is so far the only reader to point this out, but if another 93 would care to write in making this same argument, we will place all this correspondence in one of our special folders.

Rats on parade

Our quest for the most niche scientific tourist attractions continues, with museums of grain and gas setting the pace.

Simon Goodman reports having found “a lovely example” in Siem Reap, Cambodia, which is the jumping-off point to visit the Angkor temple complex. There he found a for the charity APOPO, which uses trained African giant pouched rats to detect landmines. “This is a must-see place,” says Simon. “The highlight is seeing how the rats are trained and search out mines, which the carers show you live.”

If that weren’t enough, if you agree to remove potentially toxic substances like sun cream from your skin, “You are even allowed to cuddle the rats.” They are cat-sized and “delightful”, Simon reports.

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.