Suggestions is our weekly column of weird tales, implausible promoting claims, complicated directions and extra
The yr in daft
Being a New Scientist reader, you might be most likely savvy sufficient to grasp that end-of-year roundups are written weeks forward of time. This specific summation was drafted on 1 December, simply as Suggestions was making ready to spend 24 days avoiding listening to Wham’s Final Christmas and making an attempt to influence Suggestions Jr to make their thoughts up on what they need for his or her primary current. Something radically foolish that will have occurred after that date should wait till subsequent yr.
Really, 2025 has been wealthy in all of the issues Suggestions is occupied with. We discovered about fascinating proposals like nuking the seabed to cease local weather change, a notion that went straight into our Do Not Advocate pile. There was additionally an try to create a really annoying robotic. This was a motorised arm that might fake handy you an ice cream cone, solely to whisk it away on the final second in quite a lot of supposedly entertaining methods. Remarkably, folks didn’t belief it.
To deliver some order to the chaos, we hereby current Suggestions’s 2025 end-of-year awards, which we’re going to name the Backsies until somebody writes in with a greater suggestion. The judges (that’s us) selected the classes and winners by a rigorous course of that undoubtedly didn’t contain Publish-it notes and darts.
Finest scientific acronym
Sooner or later, Suggestions want to see a research study the period of time and power human society spends arising with ingenious and/or pressured acronyms. We suspect it’s a drain on international productiveness equal to 2 flu seasons and a World Cup ultimate.
Suggestions invited contributions on this matter after studying about “a machine-learning mannequin that may predict a chemical’s style based mostly on its molecular construction”, named the Taste Evaluation and Recognition Transformer, or FART. We weren’t ready for the following onslaught of acronyms, which ranged from a hydrography venture known as Administration Of Rivers Discharging into Ocean Realms (MORDOR) to 2 devices on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover known as Scanning Liveable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemical substances (SHERLOC) and Broad Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) – though that one is dishonest.
Regardless, the judges (ourselves) had been unanimous that this award be given to the geneticists who got here up with “a technique for estimating mutation charges and up to date demographic historical past from very giant samples”. They known as it “Diffusion for Uncommon Parts in Variation Inventories which might be Massive”, or DR EVIL. Groovy.
Finest outdated new know-how
One of many afflictions of the fashionable world is folks pondering they’ve invented one thing new when, the truth is, they’ve merely rebranded one thing outdated. There was a standout winner right here: Ugmonk, an organization that has produced a “minimalist, paper-based to-do supervisor“. The gadget is meant to switch on-line task-management techniques, so you possibly can work offline with out the distractions of social media. It consists of some index playing cards that relaxation on a block of wooden.
Finest extrapolation
No contest: demographers David Swanson and Jeff Tayman take this one for his or her paper noting a small decline in human fertility between 2019 and 2024, after which extrapolating all the best way to the extinction of the human species in 2339 (or, with only one extra yr of information, 2415).
Finest use of AI
The issue right here was alternative. Infinite, countless alternative. We had been tempted to provide this prize to Anthropic, which let its AI Claude run a merchandising machine within the agency’s workplace. Claude began by asking clients to pay cash to a checking account it had hallucinated. It then pretended to be a human being sporting a blue blazer and a purple tie. Nevertheless, this was an in-house experiment, so is disqualifed.
As an alternative, this award goes to AI music. Probably the most distinguished faux AI band thus far, The Velvet Sunset, sound just like the cursed love little one of Coldplay and the Eagles. There’s one thing unutterably excellent about this. After being skilled on just about all recorded music, the AI is producing the blandest type of music it’s attainable to think about.
And eventually…
Let’s finish with one thing foolish and a bit impolite. On a number of events in 2025, Suggestions discovered ourselves coping with the Scunthorpe drawback: the truth that many fully innocuous phrases comprise letter strings that may be, in sure contexts, offensive – and the issues this causes for on-line moderation techniques.
We obtained onto this after listening to of a Virgin Cash chatbot objecting to the phrase “virgin”. From there, we discovered of a scholar unable to arrange an electronic mail account as his surname was Peacock, and of an incident afflicting researchers learning sperm whales.
Nevertheless, our favorite instance concerned a pc server at a financial institution that refused to speak with a French server named for the Asterix character Petitsuix, because it contained the phrase “tits”. We’re selecting this one due to reader Nick Brown, who informed us the story, and who urged {that a} financial institution with such a poorly-run server was liable to go, erm, bust.
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