New Scientist, Author at New Scientist

A surprisingly detailed look at the physics of a lugworm’s poop

New Scientist — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0000

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

Physics of defecation

News editor Alexandra Thompson passes along a press release from the University of Amsterdam entitled “Hoe de poep-emoji zijn vorm kreeg“. A hasty bit of translation reveals that this means “How the poop emoji got its shape”.

For those whose knowledge of emoji doesn’t extend beyond the smiley face, a spot of explanation may be in order. Buried in the emoji alphabet is the poop emoji, which, though it can take many guises IRL, is shaped like a sort of conical tower made up of coiled ropes of faeces. The Emojipedia website helpfully compares it to “soft-serve ice cream”, which, in these heatwave-addled times, is a frankly monstrous image to put into people’s minds.

Readers who saw the 2017 cinematic triumph The Emoji Movie may recall that the poop emoji was a significant supporting character, its voice provided by none other than Shakespearean starship captain Patrick Stewart. We therefore encourage you to imagine that the rest of this item is being read by Stewart in his most stentorian tones.

The press release directed us to a of the physics of lugworm poop, published in Nature Communications in April. The authors explain that many animals produce coiled poop, as illustrated by the emoji, including earthworms and some mammals. This shape emerges from “the coiling of fluid ‘ropes’ falling onto a rigid surface”, which is controlled by a combination of gravity, inertia and viscosity.

Lugworms are an interesting exception, because they defecate upwards, against gravity. They live in U-shaped burrows in intertidal sand flats. At low tide, each lugworm positions its anus just below the burrow entrance and poops upwards, leaving a deposit on the surface of the sand flat.

Yet despite defecating in the opposite direction to most animals, the lugworms still manage to produce a coiled poop. Somehow, this manages to hold its shape despite the risk of “buckling instabilities”. Resistance, at least to buckling instabilities, is apparently not futile.

Furthermore, the radius of the coil is “determined solely by material properties and rope geometry”, unlike in animals that defecate downwards, where the height of the fall is a key factor.

The researchers go on to describe this in great mathematical detail, and to show that the same model can accurately describe the coiling of other substances, such as rice noodles and spaghetti. There is something oddly beautiful about all this: it turns out the universe isn’t so badly designed.

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A qeux for Bayeux

Queueing, and how to optimise it for maximum fairness and efficiency, is an intriguing little area of applied maths. If one train is late arriving at a station, should it be prioritised – perhaps causing a delay to another train – or made to wait? What would be fairest to the people on the trains, and the most efficient way to run the railway system?

Feedback has no idea, but we do know that history buff and chief subeditor Kelsey Hayes had a trying experience of online queueing courtesy of the British Museum. Kelsey is a paying member of the museum, so she got an email in early June notifying her that it would be showing the Bayeux tapestry from September: the first time it has been in the UK for 900 years. Members would get access to an early ticket sale, two weeks before tickets were made available to the general public.

The email advised Kelsey “to register to book” a slot. Or, as she put it, “it’s a sign-up to do a sign-up”. She booted it up, only to discover an online queue that was “over 1400 people deep and takes 20 minutes to get through”.

Once she had gone through the process, Kelsey learned it was an exercise in what she called “getting members to have their log-in details in order, so that there isn’t a register/reset password apocalypse in a couple of weeks”. Never before has Kelsey, or anyone Feedback knows, been asked to sit in a virtual queue for 20 minutes in order to reset a password.

Two weeks later, member booking finally opened. “Took me 4 hours in the queue to get a time slot,” Kelsey reports. She’s going to be so mad when she finds out it wasn’t made in Bayeux and isn’t even a tapestry.

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Not my bag

Feedback always enjoys laughing at hubris, so it gives us considerable pleasure to deliver the news that a bag made of a trademarked substance called “T-Rex Leather” at a Paris auction in June. The bag was expected to go for more than $500,000, but in the end the bids never even approached that.

It was apparently created using from a Tyrannosaurus rex femur, and Feedback is going to stop you right there. Leather is made from skin, and this “T-Rex Leather” isn’t made from T. rex skin.

Collagen is just one of many proteins and other biomolecules found in skin. To recreate T. rex skin properly, you would need a full T. rex genome in order to grow T. rex skin cells. Good luck with that: the oldest known preserved DNA is from a site in Greenland and is 2 million years old, while T. rex went extinct perhaps 66 million years ago.

We don’t have any T. rex DNA, let alone a full genome, so we can’t grow T. rex skin cells. Feedback would like to think this is why the bag didn’t sell, but we fear it might just be because it’s a distinctly unfashionable colour.

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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.

Synthetic biology may finally be ready to solve life’s biggest mystery

New Scientist — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:38:05 +0000

The synthetic SpudCell shows many of the properties of life

Orion Venero, Adamala Lab

A living organism is made from components that aren’t themselves living. This simple statement has profound implications. For one, it means that there is no mystical force that animates us and other life forms. For another, it means that it should be possible to build a life form from scratch – and we are now a step closer to doing so.

Artificial life has been the guiding light of synthetic biology for some time. In 2010, biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in California synthesised the stripped-down genome of a bacterium and inserted it into the chassis of another cell, emptied of its own DNA. The resulting organism, with a record-low number of genes (473) was able to grow and reproduce. But even then, scientists didn’t understand what a third of those genes were doing, or whether they were even needed. Instead of rebooting an existing cell with a synthetic genome, we need to build an organism from the ground up.

That is what scientists at the University of Missouri are now attempting. The SpudCell – named both to evoke Sputnik and the dawn of the space age, and for its resemblance to a potato – is an entity based on just 36 genes. It self-assembled when the genes were supplied with all the building blocks necessary for life, forming cell-like bubbles and making proteins.

SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life

But that’s it. The SpudCell can only make proteins because it is supplied with ribosomes, the crucial cell components that make proteins. It can’t metabolise food, supply itself with energy or reliably divide and reproduce. It isn’t alive, and it needs intensive care just to perform its basic functions. Nevertheless, the SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life. If a modern living cell is a jet airliner, the SpudCell is the rickety wooden-and-cotton proto-airplane made by the Wright brothers.

Better versions will soon follow, with potentially transformative applications. The hope is that synthetic cells will one day be able to supply materials that are currently derived from fossil fuels, such as plastics, fuels and fertiliser. That is keenly needed. But the work in understanding how a living entity operates will shed light on what life needs, and how it emerges from dead materials. If we crack this ultimate mystery, synthetic biology will have really delivered.

Do you want your underwear with added probiotics?

New Scientist — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0000

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

Down under

No less a personage than New Scientist‘s editor, Catherine de Lange, alerted us to this development. Naturally, we have made it our lead item: it’s our way of saying sorry for all the times Cat has had to say things like, “For crying out loud, don’t print that, you’ll get us sued into oblivion for a one-liner.” Cat had been sent a press release for a company called , which she forwarded to Feedback without comment. It’s always a good sign when a colleague sends us something and doesn’t even bother to say anything snarky. We assume they have been so floored by what they read that they simply couldn’t think of anything to add. Underdays’ product is underwear infused with beneficial bacteria that nourish your skin microbiome. Or, as the press release puts it: “The most intimate layer just got an IQ”. Feedback briefly considered whether bacteria could be said to have an IQ, but we decided not to fall down that particular rabbit hole because there was so much else to discuss. The press release invites us to consider the prospect of “prebiotics and probiotics, infused into the fabric, transferring to your skin all day”. This, we are told, “supports your microbiome”, “strengthens your skin barrier” and “promotes a healthier appearance”. These new garments offer a potentially significant time-saver: “No creams. No serums. No extra steps. Just get dressed and have your skincare, woven in.” Because if there’s one thing we all need, it’s to further optimise our mornings so we spend less time on self-care. Feedback has a lot of questions about this, but we will focus on just one: what happens when you wash the undergarments? Over the years, we have become aware that underwear needs to be washed regularly, but in this case, that seems to pose an issue. Won’t the elevated temperatures and laundry chemicals take a toll on the probiotic bacteria in the underwear? To find out, we switched to private mode on our browser and visited the Underdays website. After scrolling past a lot of photos of different underwear, we found an FAQs page. There we learned that the underwear doesn’t actually replace your existing skincare routine, because you should “use it alongside your existing products”. It seems that vital time-saving element may be a mirage. Curses. But what about washing? The FAQ offers explicit guidance: “We recommend washing all our underwear on a cool wash, maximum 40 degrees in a garment bag. Air-dry flat in shade. Do not iron or tumble dry.” However, users are advised to “wash at 30°C on a gentle cycle”. If you do so, it promises, the probiotics in the underwear will last for “up to 40 washes”. Underlays didn’t respond to a request for comment about how this all worked, scientifically. And if you think about it, the phrase “up to 40 washes” encompasses a wide range of possibilities.

Places to go

Increasingly niche scientific tourist attractions continue to trickle into our inbox, following the foraminifera sculpture park (11 April) and moss garden (9 May). Carolyn Smith writes in to confirm our suspicion that there might be a curated set of beach pebbles somewhere in the world. “Here on the North Norfolk coast we have two – count them – shell museums,” she says. “I am not sure if there is a big rivalry between them,” she adds, nor is she “affiliated or getting any shell commission”, but Carolyn asserts nevertheless that the best one is the in Glandford. It claims to be the home of “the finest seashell collection in the UK”. Carolyn didn’t identify the other shell museum, perhaps because it’s paying her negative commission, but Feedback thinks she was referring to the in Sheringham, which hosts “an exhibition of almost 200 stunning shell-art sculptures”. At the other end of the planet, Catrin Kerlin “grew up in a small town called Maffra in Victoria, Australia”, which has “a museum about the history of sugar beet farming”. Feedback was reluctant to believe this, but there is indeed a in Maffra. “Despite living in Maffra until I was 18, I think I only actually went inside there once,” says Catrin. “Far more memorable was playing on all the old, rusting farming equipment outside.” Catrin also identified the reason the museum hasn’t achieved the fame it perhaps deserves: it is open “once a month for three hours”. Specifically, from 10am to 1pm “on the first Sunday of each month, from February to November”. Plan trips accordingly.

Feeling tense

Plenty of people can’t park a car. At the time of writing, Feedback is still recovering from a wave of irritation caused by some nitwit who had parked in a two-car bay. Owing to failing to pull all the way to one end of the bay, they had blocked anyone else from using the spot. Clearly, some instruction is required. However, the instructions sent in by B. Evans, who spotted them in a car park in Devon, UK, appear less than instructive. The sign reads: “ALL VEHICLES [that first bit is underlined] MUST NOT PARK OUTSIDE OF BAYS”. As Evans says: “It seems to have invented a new grammar tense”, which we might call the “negative imperative”. Evans was initially unsure how to obey the sign, but did find a solution: “I attempted to comply by not parking, in a positive way.” Feedback wonders if Evans has achieved some sort of vehicular quantum superposition, and congratulates them heartily if so. �� 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.

Can climate change stay in the news agenda after Europe’s heatwave?

New Scientist — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0000

The heatwave that swept Europe last week saw many temperature records broken, leading people to ask if extraordinary June heat is the “new normal”. Unfortunately, the truth is that we are never going to have normal in our lifetimes again – just ever more extreme heat.

Climate scientists are continually warning of the need to prepare for hotter heatwaves, worse droughts, more flooding and rising seas. During heatwaves like the one just passed, the hottest and most humid ever seen in Europe, they might even get a little media coverage. But then the weather cools, the news agenda moves on and nothing is ever done.

We are currently on course for average global surface temperatures to rise by between 2.1°C and 3.3°C by 2100, and possibly even more. Even these alarming numbers are a little misleading because the oceans that cover most of the planet don’t warm as fast as the land. Average land temperatures are therefore going to go up by a lot more than the above numbers imply.

But what really matters to us is extreme weather, not the average. The projections for future extremes are already dire, and there are reasons to think that we are in for extremes even greater than those currently projected for a given level of warming. With uncertainties over the survival of the vital AMOC ocean current and the risk of a major glacier collapse, the only thing we really do know is that we must prepare for conditions far worse than Europe has just experienced.

We are on course for average global surface temperatures to rise by between 2.1°C and 3.3°C

It is possible to get through even worse heatwaves if all your infrastructure and systems are geared up to cope, but for most countries, this isn’t the case. The fact is, the world is changing fast and we need to change just about every aspect of our lives to adapt – our homes and offices, factories and schools, cars and trains, farms and gardens, and so on. But it isn’t happening. One day, after the tragic deaths grow too great to bear, we will ask why we did nothing to prevent them.

Hold the onions – and see if they make you cry

New Scientist — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

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

Know your onions

Feedback could never be a professional chef. That’s partly because there is no way we could stand the pressure of such a frantic work environment, to say nothing of the stress of potentially running into Gordon Ramsay. But mostly it’s because we would tear up every time we had to chop an onion. The reason some of us cry when we chop onions is a chemical called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which gets sprayed into the air. It triggers the trigeminal nerve, which, in turn, activates the tear ducts to wash away the irritating chemical. So far, so annoying, but also so understudied. Is everyone equally sensitive to onions, or do we vary? And are people who are more sensitive to onion chemicals also more sensitive to chemicals generally – for instance, do they have a stronger sense of smell? We don’t know. “No research to date has explored subjective individual variability in onion tearing and its relationship to chemosensory sensitivity,” write Thomas Hummel and his colleagues in a “preliminary investigation” on 25 May in the journal – and, fair warning, this is an absolute mouthful, so good luck to whoever’s doing the audio version of this column – Laryngoscope Investigative Otolaryngology. Hummel’s team recruited 1001 volunteers and asked them to rate their sense of smell, the general state of their nasal passages, their sensitivity to stinging and burning sensations, and their propensity for crying over onions. The participants were also given psychophysical tests: for instance, they were given sticks imbued with odours and had to identify them. It turned out that the people who self-reported more tearing while cutting onions also self-reported having a better sense of smell. However, the psychophysical tests didn’t bear this out. The people who said they were prone to crying over onions didn’t do any better on the sniff tests than those who said onions didn’t bother them. Feedback has stared at these results for a day and we think what they are telling us is that people are bad at assessing their own sense of smell. As the authors put it: “These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating low correlations between subjective olfactory ability ratings and psychophysical olfactory tests.” We suspect this is in the same category as people’s tendency to believe they are above-average at driving, telling jokes and interpreting complicated scientific data. Happily, Feedback doesn’t suffer from this delusion. We know our sense of smell is bad, because Mrs Feedback detected the iffy scent in the living room well before we did, which is why it took us so long to find the dead mouse one of Feedback’s felines had so graciously hidden behind the sideboard. ��

Tidy-up time

Feedback arrives fashionably late to the trend of video games about ordinary tasks. Instead of dogfights in outer space or quests across fantastical lands, popular games such as Animal Crossing are about quotidian jobs like tidying up your village and dealing with intransigent neighbours. It was therefore inevitable that someone would create a video game where the entire task is to sort out a huge collection of library books. was released on 30 April. It’s set entirely within the walls of a library, left in a terrible mess by a mischievous fairy. The player thus faces a “long battle against the mountain of books”, as the game requires you to correctly shelve 3072 books as fast as possible. This being an arcane library, the categorisation system isn’t exactly Dewey Decimal: categories include “Romance Novels”, “Destructive Magic” and “The Travels of Otherworld”. Feedback hasn’t played Librarian: it costs £5.29 to download and this column doesn’t have that kind of budget. However, we did watch some videos of the gameplay and found it weirdly satisfying. We imagine that, like solving a Sudoku, there may be a quiet pleasure in getting everything nicely squared away. People seem to agree: as of 16 June, the game has nearly 15,000 reviews and 94 per cent of them are positive. Apparently, people quite like to meticulously tidy up a great big mess. It’s just a pity this inclination doesn’t seem to extend into the physical world, where people are prone to leaving towels all over the floor, throwing food wrappers vaguely in the direction of the bin and generally making a pigsty of the place. Clearly, the problem with the real world is that it is insufficiently gamified. ��

Think of the children

Another trend that Feedback has been slow to grasp is the semi-viral practice of university commencement speakers whenever they talk up the value of generative AI. To date, afflicted speakers include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; Scott Borchetta, the CEO and founder of Nashville record label Big Machine Records; and Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate development executive with Tavistock Development Company in Florida (who honestly feels like less of a get). One can only speculate why people in their early twenties might feel inclined to boo a technology that is frequently used to create deepfakes and propaganda, gobbles up scarce electricity and is being positioned to replace all entry-level jobs. Just remember the of Principal Seymour Skinner: “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.” �� 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.

Neuroscience can’t tell us the way to govern people’s brains

New Scientist — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Our brains love shortcuts. Decisions are often made via a subconscious muddling through, due to the . It is perhaps why we value neat categorisations of someone’s brain state, despite these being flawed.

Take the age at which you become an adult. Around the world, legal adulthood varies from 16 to 21. This difference matters, as we rightly have different expectations for children versus adults. Some call for this tension to be smoothed by asking policy-makers to consider typical brain maturity levels, ascertained via tools like brain imaging, in matters like criminal sentencing or the right to drive. The idea that our brains don’t fully develop until we are 25 is also becoming popular, but – as we discuss in our special on brain changes – this is wrong. Brains mature at different rates and there are myriad ways to measure their development.

This isn’t the only way neuroscience is looked to for informing policy before the science is ready. Take autism, which may come in several distinct types. A recently proposed category of “profound autism” could identify those with the highest needs, by assessing IQ, language skills and care requirements. This could assist in advocating for services for people in this group, but may exclude those who don’t meet strict criteria. It could also people with speech difficulties with people with cognitive impairments – different neurological profiles demanding different help.

Neuroscience is looked to for informing policy before the science is ready

Attempts to use psychological profiling in courts, too, are worrying. When presented as a mitigating factor in some cases, , taking a slam-dunk prosecution down a messier road. But . shows that, while potentially legally relevant, it can’t be used with confidence.

Our wish to put brains into tidy boxes is natural, and a future in which neuroscience can help us put a fine point on someone’s cognitive state could well be possible. That future, though, is not yet here.

The bigger the lizard, the bigger the Wiki page, discovers ecologist

New Scientist — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

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

Big lizard, big page

The bigger the reptile, the longer its Wikipedia entry. So finds ecologist at Florida Atlantic University. He scraped all the Wikipedia pages about reptiles, then used this dataset to produce a graph mapping the relationship between each reptile’s body mass and the length of its page. As he on Bluesky: “Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85.” Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Conservationists will tell anyone who will listen that we are biased towards more “charismatic” animals, which is why conservation campaigns tend to feature photos of polar bears and pandas. Charismatic animals tend to be larger, as shown by a 2020 study that found people rated larger animals as more charismatic on the whole. Still, Fahimipour’s graph is a scatterplot: there is a pretty clear upwards line, but there is also a fair bit of scatter. He explained on Bluesky that the species that stray from the line follow a pattern: “Greatest deviants tend to be venomous species, who have all that extra medical text.” Feedback believes it should be possible to build upon this dataset by extending it into the realm of reptiles that don’t actually exist. So we the Wikipedia page for noted fictional reptile Godzilla, which runs to around 7500 words (including references). Sadly, we cannot give a reliable mass for Godzilla, as his size has varied so much. Back in 2014, we reported that Godzilla had elongated from a modest 50 metres in his 1954 debut to well over 100 m, and since then the 2017 film Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters has apparently him to 300 m. Estimates of his mass vary accordingly. Nevertheless, Feedback thinks Godzilla deviates from the trend. His 7500-word Wikipedia page is shorter than the more than 8000 words (references also included) allocated to the Komodo dragon, which Fahimipour identifies as the longest page in his dataset. Regardless of how big Godzilla is, he is way larger than those piffling lizards, yet his Wiki page is not appropriately kaiju-sized.

Orwell strikes again

It has been over a year since Feedback last tackled the topic of scientific conferences and journals with wildly over-generous invitation lists. Readers with long memories may recall the story of Bruce Durie, a genealogist who found himself invited to speak or write on topics as diverse as chemistry and posthumanism. Still, at least those invites were (presumably) real, unlike the one sent to science writer Philip Ball. He received an email begging him to submit something to a molecular biology journal – and everything about it was a red flag. For starters, the email was addressed to “Respected Ball, P”. Assuming Philip got past that, the following text contained a lot of peculiar phrases, like “We are accepting the all types of articles”. It also claimed that “Our journal publishing across 150 specialized topics under Biology, Medicine, Engineering and General Science”, which is odd given the emailer said the journal was called “Molecular & Cellular Biology“. To confuse matters further, later in the message the journal was re-identified as “IgMin Research – A Biomed & Engineering Journal“. Then came the pièce de résistance. The email was signed: “Sincere Regards, George Orwell, Editorial Operations Manager”. : “Bit disappointed that the Editorial Operations Manager isn’t striving harder for plausibility here.” Fortunately, Feedback hasn’t fallen for any such emails lately. We have been promised that our own research will be published in the Journal of Runways by its editor, Miranda Priestly.

Dog ate my homework

Feedback has had some hair-raising experiences with deadlines over the years, but none quite so alarming as that reported by Samantha Shannon. The author of best-selling fantasy novels like The Priory of the Orange Tree, Shannon her Instagram followers about “the funniest excuse I’ve ever given for not hitting a deadline”. To fully enjoy this story, readers may wish to know that it all happened in 2024 and that Shannon is fine. Her editor emailed to ask “how you’re getting on with the edits for The Dark Mirror?” To which Shannon replied: “I am waiting for an ambulance to take me to hospital because I just poisoned myself with a smoothie containing pulverised cherry stones, which I did not realise contain amygdalin, a compound that the body converts to literal cyanide. I wish I was joking.” Feedback thinks this is an argument for us all to revisit some classic books. A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup outlines the poisons used in the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, who knew an interestingly large amount about poison, while Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook explains the origins of forensic toxicology. Somewhere along the way, surely one of these volumes will contain reminders about which bits of various fruits are best avoided. In any event, the incident evidently didn’t do Shannon too much harm, because, unlike some fantasy authors we could mention, she seems to hit most of her deadlines and is on track to finish her projected seven-volume Bone Season series. Nevertheless, Feedback would like to ask her to please not go mushroom foraging unsupervised, because we would like to know what happens to Paige at the end of the story. �� 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.

Killer robots are here – we must finally decide whether to accept them

New Scientist — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:55:05 +0000

Should drones be allowed to kill autonomously?

Shutterstock/Thongsuk7824

For years, we have had unconfirmed reports and rumours that AI-controlled weapons have killed soldiers on the battlefield without a human in the loop. Now, we know it has happened.

As we report here, the use of autonomous killers in a test exercise marks a watershed in warfare. But we shouldn’t be surprised. The technology has existed for some time and humans have never invented a weapon and then refrained from using it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t reverse course. The logic for a ban on autonomous weapons is simple: deploying AI without human oversight risks weapons accidentally targeting troops on the wrong side or even civilians. What’s more, ethicists say that such weapons deprive combatants of their dignity, make war too easy to wage and muddy the waters when it comes to responsibility for lethal action.

But if we are to ban these weapons, just as we have done with cluster bombs and lasers designed to blind soldiers, we should have acted before they arrived, not after. The United Nations has been in talks to ban fully autonomous weapons for over a decade, but according to the Human Rights Watch campaign group, India, Israel, Russia and the US have vetoed the discussions.

Humans have never invented a weapon and then refrained from using it

The framework to ban autonomous weapons already exists – they could easily be added to the list of excessively injurious or indiscriminate arms proscribed by the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. More difficult to reckon with is the fact that these drones can be made with inexpensive parts ordered online and some open-source software. Any
tech-literate teenager could do it.

As we explore here, the war in Ukraine has made it clear that robots will dominate future battlefields. The question the world must now answer is whether a human should always be involved, ultimately responsible for the decision to pull the trigger, or whether machines can be allowed to act alone. Whichever we choose, a decision must be made before the technology proliferates.

Think you have a good sense of humour? So do most people…

New Scientist — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

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

Funny feeling

Scientific papers don’t usually hit their readers in the feels. It’s hard to become emotionally entangled with transcriptional regulators or muon neutrinos. But this week, Feedback was sent a study that made us feel positively queasy. Assistant news editor Alexandra Thompson had spotted a by social psychologist Paul Silvia at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his colleagues. It’s called: “Who laughs at their own jokes? Metacognitive judgments of self-rated funniness in creative humor production tasks”. Oh no, Feedback thought. We do tend to think we’re funny – at least some of the time and not always on purpose – but what if we’re kidding ourselves? What if this paper shows that people of Feedback’s ilk are liable to laugh at their own jokes even if nobody else does? The paper opens in confrontational style: “When we imagine someone who thinks that they’re hilarious and laughs at their own jokes, we might have someone specific in mind, for better or worse, like an insufferable ex-boyfriend [or] a parent armed with a book of dad jokes.” Feedback instantly had a mental image of David Brent/Michael Scott (delete as appropriate). Silvia and his team go on to inform us that “most people view themselves as having a better-than-average sense of humor”. They offer some stats to support that, like a classic study where fewer than 2 per cent of participants rated their sense of humour as below average. Then they go for the jugular: “The concept of a ‘sense of humor,’ however, is so abstract, ill-defined, and difficult to disconfirm that it is a perfect vessel for someone’s unrealistic and self-enhancing beliefs.” At this point, Feedback started to feel like something nameless and malign was gnawing on our spinal cord. Are we funny? Have we ever been funny? Silvia and his team later describe a series of experiments in which they gave people prompts and asked them for humorous responses, then got them to rate how funny their responses were. The prompts were things like: “Imagine you and a friend are ordering something to eat at a new food truck. After the truck’s cook hands over your food, you and your friend walk off to a nearby bench to eat. You take a big bite – and the food is totally disgusting. You turn to your friend, and say, ‘….’ ” It turns out that people rate their ideas as funnier if they have higher confidence, if they believe they are generally funny, if they scored higher on personality traits like extraversion and narcissism and – readers may feel there is a certain inevitability to this last one – “when they identified as male”. How reassuring: Feedback is nothing like that, so if we think we’re funny, we probably are. We’re still not telling you what we would say to that prompt, though.

Satan versus gravity

In “The death of the author”, Roland Barthes argued that individual readers’ interpretations of books are just as valid as those intended by the authors. George Orwell may have intended Animal Farm as a parable about the Russian revolution, but if Feedback reads it as meaning that pigs are sneaky, we are not wrong. We were reminded of this essay when reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan sent us a about Timothy Burbery’s talk at the European Geoscience Union’s annual meeting in May, titled ““. Burbery, who is at Marshall University in West Virginia, has taken a fresh look at Dante Alighieri’s classic poem The Divine Comedy. Prior to the events of the story, Satan has fallen from heaven into hell. Burbery is interested in “the geophysical elements of Satan’s fall from Heaven”. The press release goes into more detail. “Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunnelling to the Earth’s centre,” it says. “Burbery suggests treating the Prince of Darkness as an oblong, asteroid-sized body… Like the Hoba meteorite, which remains a 60-ton intact mass, Dante’s Satan is modelled as a physical, un-vaporized impactor that permanently restructured the Earth’s architecture.” This allows for a radical reinterpretation of the poem. “In this light, the nine circles of Hell are no longer merely symbolic tiers of sin, but rather a remarkably accurate description of the concentric, terraced morphology found in multi-ring impact basins across the solar system, from the Moon to Venus.” Feedback isn’t entirely sure, but we think the circles might actually be symbolic tiers of sin, and that this is all taking the death of the author a little bit too far.

Waymo out of line

“Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood, keep circling cul-de-sac,” on 15 May. Waymo said the driverless cars had experienced “a routing problem”, causing them to get that was both figurative and literal. Footage on showed the cars endlessly puttering around a cul-de-sac, getting in each other’s way, reversing, getting in another Waymo’s way, and so on for hours. Feedback can generally get out of a cul-de-sac in two or three attempts, but maybe that’s because we’re not artificially intelligent. Full marks to the anonymous Bluesky user known only as “Capitalist with a heart of gold” who . 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.

Why controversial ideas in science shouldn’t always be dismissed

New Scientist — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Maverick scientists often get a bad reputation among their more sober peers. Science requires evidence and consensus, and contrarianism is rarely a way forward.

But there is always an exception that proves the rule. Take the idea that the ketogenic diet – a restrictive regime most famous as a way to rapidly lose weight – could be a treatment for anorexia nervosa. Given that this is a psychiatric condition characterised by a compulsion to restrict food, the proposal sounds absurd at best, painfully irresponsible at worst.

We should take this counterintuitive idea seriously, however. As we learn in this week’s cover story, following the diet does seem to help people with the condition, albeit only in a small study. It is thought to be a result of keto correcting haywire energy release in brain cells, thereby cutting anxiety and, with it, the compulsion to restrict food. If nothing else, this is a sign that keto should be studied as a potential anorexia treatment. At present, one-third of those with the condition don’t recover from standard treatment, and anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric condition.

It is a mistake to think an idea is bad simply because people who have bad ideas support it

Unfortunately, supporting keto as a treatment for serious mental health conditions aligns one with people such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the controversial US health secretary. When it comes to health advice, you can’t get much more maverick than a man who claims, without evidence, that vaccines cause autism.

But it is a mistake to think that an idea is bad simply because people who generally have bad ideas support it. Multiple lines of evidence point towards keto’s mental health benefits – as we set out in our 2 May cover story, it seems to hold promise for blunting the symptoms of conditions from severe depression to schizophrenia. Given the research is at an early stage, the diet should be used for anorexia only under medical supervision, as much larger trials are needed. But seeking solutions to debilitating conditions via careful science is vital, even if doing so carries the risk of initially being labelled absurd, irresponsible or maverick.