Best acronym? Best use of AI? We present our end-of-year awards
Feedback has spent some time sifting through 2025's key scientific achievements to come up with a range of weird and wonderful (and less wonderful) winners for our inaugural Backsies awards
Josie Ford
Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
The year in daft
Being a New Scientist reader, you are probably savvy enough to realise that end-of-year roundups are written weeks ahead of time. This particular summation was drafted on 1 December, just as Feedback was preparing to spend 24 days avoiding hearing Wham’s Last Christmas and trying to persuade Feedback Jr to make their mind up on what they want for their main present. Anything radically silly that may have happened after that date will have to wait until next year.
Truly, 2025 has been rich in all the things Feedback is interested in. We learned about fascinating proposals like nuking the seabed to stop climate change, a notion that went straight into our Do Not Recommend pile. There was also an attempt to create a truly annoying robot. This was a motorised arm that could pretend to hand you an ice cream cone, only to whisk it away at the last second in a variety of supposedly entertaining ways. Remarkably, people didn’t trust it.
To bring some order to the chaos, we hereby present Feedback’s 2025 end-of-year awards, which we’re going to call the Backsies unless someone writes in with a better suggestion. The judges (that’s us) chose the categories and winners through a rigorous process that definitely didn’t involve Post-it notes and darts.
Best scientific acronym
One day, Feedback would like to see a study examine the amount of time and energy human society spends coming up with ingenious and/or forced acronyms. We suspect it is a drain on global productivity equivalent to two flu seasons and a World Cup final.
Feedback invited contributions on this topic after learning about “a machine-learning model that can predict a chemical’s taste based on its molecular structure”, named the Flavor Analysis and Recognition Transformer, or FART. We weren’t prepared for the subsequent onslaught of acronyms, which ranged from a hydrography project called Management Of Rivers Discharging into Ocean Realms () to on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover called Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) and Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) – although that one is cheating.