Feedback is New Scientist’s a popular side view of the latest science and technology news. Items you think readers might find interesting can be submitted to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com
Even stranger things
It seems common for a substantial portion of the human species that Feedback spent part of our vacation watching the final episodes of the series Stranger Things. We laughed, we cried, we wondered if it would have more endings than Return of the King (was).
As is almost inevitable these days, a group of fans took a vocal dislike to the finale and went so far as to create a conspiracy theory about it. According to “Gate of Conformity” (don’t blame us, we didn’t name it), the finale wasn’t quite the finale – even though it lasted over 2 hours, cost a fortune and was shown in theaters. No, a super secret final episode was supposed to air in January, which would reveal the true ending. The evidence for this consisted mainly of some minor continuity errorsall supposedly hinting that everything we saw was an illusion created by the mind-controlling villain Vecna.
Feedback was convinced it was stupid, even before the supposed extra episode didn’t appear. Not least because the people criticizing the finale were making bad reviews. Who cares if the school uniforms are the wrong color when the whole set defies physics?
For those who haven’t watched, Stranger Things takes place in a town in Indiana where a government lab has been conducting risky experiments. This—and there are spoilers ahead, so consider this your warning—opened the gates to the “Upside Down,” a kind of nasty parallel dimension where a different version of the city exists, but everything is moldy. Eventually, the Upside Down is revealed to be a wormhole: a gateway to another dimension called the Abyss.
So if the Upside Down is a wormhole, what is this red, shaking, wobbling thing floating in the sky? This is described as a wormhole, and some say it contains “exotic matter”, a hypothetical substance that would have to exist for a real wormhole to form (and which probably doesn’t exist). This is doubly strange because the passage to the Abyss is in the Upside Down sky.
Feedback has been thinking about this for weeks, and we can’t figure out what the fiddly coiled thing is doing there. We also can’t solve it because firing a gun will liquefy all surrounding matter, but blowing it up with explosives will destroy the entire Upside Down. And we can’t solve it either, because destroying this huge wormhole won’t release enough energy to destroy most of the east coast.
Perhaps Gate of Consistency theorists could turn their attention to solving the physics of the Upside Down. A Nobel Prize, or at least an Ig Nobel, could be in the offing.
Sparkling sports
What could be more fun than going to a sports match: being part of the crowd and cheering on your players? How about being part of the crowd, cheering on your players and drinking sparkling water? That might be more fun.
Reporter Alice Klein noted a study about an experiment that showed spectators at a college women’s basketball game enjoyed the game more and felt a greater “perceived oneness” with the crowd if they drank some sparkling water than non-sparkling water. “Communal consumption of sparkling water serves as a low-stress, non-alcoholic ritual to enhance social connection during and after live sporting events,” the authors said.
Alice described it as “ridiculous”, to which news editor Jacob Aron replied: “They surveyed a full 40 people, what more do you want? Readers can make up their own minds as to whether the evidence is compelling. However, Feedback would like to draw readers’ attention to the paper’s “Competing Interests” statement, which we will not comment on, which reads as follows:
“This study was funded by Asahi Soft Drinks Co., Ltd. WK and SM are employees of Asahi Soft Drinks Co., Ltd. The authors declare that this did not influence the research design, methodology, analysis, or interpretation of the results of this study. The sponsor had no control over the interpretation, writing, or publication of this work.”
The first idiots
Reader Peter Brooker asked if Feedback could start a new section called “AI Bloopers”. He was moved to suggest this after checking the puzzle on a “popular search engine”, but his AI tool confidently informed him that the first six primes were 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11.
Feedback feels that we have been running this section for some time, just without an official name. In fact (and we can give you a little peek behind the curtain here), we have a recurring conversation with our editor about how often to feature AI that goes wrong like this. We could fill an entire AI column every week with nonsense, but we were afraid it would repeat itself.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of Peter’s request, we must tell you that the new rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutterová, used generative AI write your first speech in a role. It contained Albert Einstein quotes that the AI was hallucinating.
To quote Brussels Times: “Strikingly, De Sutter herself referred to the dangers of AI in her speech. She warned that we should not ‘blindly trust’ the output of AI tools and that AI-generated texts ‘are not always easy to distinguish from original works’.”
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