Josie Ford

Feedback is New Scientist’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

A gift of a headline

Feedback is a sucker for a truly spectacular headline. One where the first few words are utterly bizarre and you think it can’t get any weirder, only for the header to go ever further off the deep end with every subsequent word, until you are left wondering if you’re reading a news source or a lost novel by James Joyce.

On 29 November in the online music magazine Stereogum, there appeared a fine example of the form: “Grimes DJing immortality influencer’s shroom trip with special guest Mr. Beast“. If you are baffled, fear not: we will now spend the next few paragraphs explaining what is going on.

Let’s start on the left. Grimes is a musician whose albums often have sci-fi themes. A climate-themed 2020 release was called Miss Anthropocene, and her debut Geidi Primes was a tribute (albeit misspelled) to Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Meanwhile, Bryan Johnson is a tech millionaire who has decided he wants to live forever, devoting a large chunk of his time to experimenting with ways to extend his lifespan. This has included exercising (OK), changing his diet (fine), taking an immunosuppressant drug called rapamycin, normally used for people who have received organ transplants (he stopped this one) and ultimately planning to upload his mind into an AI (of course).

The story is that Johnson took hallucinogenic mushrooms and had a bunch of biomarkers measured, all while being livestreamed. Grimes was brought in to play music while he did this. While YouTuber MrBeast didn’t make an appearance in the end, others did, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and tech journalist Ashlee Vance. If we were ever to trip out of our minds on psilocybin-laced fungi, we would rather have a trained therapist and a loved one in the room. But we are sure Johnson knew what he was doing.

The video of the event is available online. It is a little over five and half hours long. Feedback should have watched the whole thing, in the spirit of due diligence, but unlike Johnson we know we will die one day, and we aren’t going to waste all that time.

Unthinkable questions

This may be the start of a new recurring theme for Feedback: “questions we never thought to ask”. Reader Keith Edkins spotted our first such item, and all we can say to everyone who tries to follow this up is: good luck.

Keith saw a 2014 paper in Folia Parasitologica, which as the title implies is devoted to parasites. One such parasite is Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled organism that infects cats and is present in many people, and which may be linked to psychiatric conditions such as intermittent explosive disorder. Hence the question in the paper’s title: “Does the prevalence of latent toxoplasmosis and frequency of Rhesus-negative subjects correlate with the nationwide rate of traffic accidents?”

As Keith says, “The answer appears to be ‘No, if you control the statistics properly’.” But what a question. Can anyone top it?

Graphics from hell

Sometimes explanatory graphics aren’t. In our long and undistinguished career in science journalism, Feedback has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what on earth researchers were trying to convey in the complicated graphics they provide. Flowcharts that loop back on themselves, bar graphs with colour-coded shading in monochrome – you name it, we have been mildly confused by it.

However, a graphic in a recent paper in Scientific Reports takes the biscuit, and in fact the whole biscuit tin. Reader Jim Santo flagged it, noting “this one’s a doozy”, but we had already seen it. Published on 19 November, the study purported to describe an AI-based system for assisting with the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Feedback has no particular opinion on the study itself, and it wouldn’t matter if we did, because the journal retracted it on 5 December.

Feedback anticipated this, having seen scientists discussing the paper on social media, so we hastily downloaded a copy. The key issue is figure 1, which claims to be the “Overall working of the framework presented as an infographic”. It must be seen to be believed.

At the centre is a woman with a small child on her lap. Her legs appear to be encased in concrete. The child is pointing to a speech bubble, which reads “MISSING VALUE &runctitional features”. To the right is another speech bubble, which says “Historical medical frymblal & Environental features”.

Elsewhere there is a pink blob that could be a damaged kidney bean, which apparently represents “7 TOL Llne storee”. There is also a mention of “Factor Fexcectorn”, and an inexplicable bicycle with spikes.

As the journal notes in its retraction, the whole thing is AI-generated, but Feedback found ourselves staring in ever-growing fascination. Towards the bottom of the graphic there is a mention of “Totalbottl”, and we wondered if the explanation might be found at the bottom of one. As for the bicycle, we can only suggest someone has been taken for a ride.

Feedback will say this for Scientific Reports: this is one of the fastest retractions we’ve ever heard of. It’s quite common for journals to take years to retract faulty papers. Retraction Watch reported on 3 December that dozens of papers by the psychologist Hans Eysenck may need to be retracted due to “questionable data” and other issues, not least weird claims that some people have “cancer-prone personalities”. To drive home the glacial pace at which this is all happening: Eysenck died in 1997.

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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.