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

Round house

There is a flourishing genre of content on YouTube and other video sites that can best be described as 鈥済awping at real estate listings鈥�. It can be beautiful, spacious houses that most of us can only dream of living in, or baroque explosions of horrific taste in interior decoration on par with whatever has happened to the White House lately.

So far, Feedback hasn鈥檛 been inclined to add to this content pile-up, but reporter Matthew Sparkes has lured us in with a on RightMove. It is for a building in Farnborough, England, on sale for 拢750,000. The listing has a link underneath the price that reads 鈥淐an you afford it?鈥� Feedback didn鈥檛 click because we don鈥檛 need a website to tell us the answer.

The building is an upright white cylinder, with chunky extra bits on one side. The built area is about 1000 square metres. Feedback struggled to precisely count the rooms because the ground floor is partly open-plan, but there are at least 10 rooms on the ground floor and potentially around 20 on the floor above, though the top floor has a disappointingly scanty five.

Matt sarcastically described it as a 鈥減erfect family home鈥�, and Feedback concurs with his sarcasm. Only a family whose members don鈥檛 enjoy each other鈥檚 company could use a building like this.

Readers wondering what this is doing in Feedback, wonder no longer. This building is the former , which was used, , to train pilots to cope with the intense g-forces required for high-velocity flight and, later, space travel. The main cylindrical building houses the centrifuge, while the drive motor and bearings are in the basement. Helen Sharman, the first UK astronaut, the centrifuge. No wonder the estate agents describe it as 鈥渁 unique opportunity to purchase a piece of British aviation history鈥�.

The Farnborough Centrifuge , when a new and more modern centrifuge was built. It passed into the hands of a charity called the . However, in August 2024, FAST announced that it had been the centrifuge after the building鈥檚 owner asked for 鈥渁 five-fold increase in rental payment鈥�.

Two years later, it is up for sale. Does anyone have a spare 拢750,000 and fancy opening a museum? Feedback promises not to highlight it as unduly niche, because it actually sounds like somewhere we might go.

A quantum civil service

The ingenuity of the UK civil service truly knows no bounds. Not only can it outsource many of its functions to private companies, but it can also translate quantum phenomena into the macroscopic world.

How else to explain the sign spotted by reader Robert Milne outside the Twickenham job centre? It reads 鈥淎utomated external defibrillator located inside鈥�. Presumably the defibrillator is in superposition both inside and outside the building. Robert wonders if the same is now true of his job: 鈥淎m I now allowed to be both in full-time paid employment and on the dole at the same time?鈥�

Feedback is further minded to inquire how much use the defibrillator is to cardiovascularly challenged members of the public during the many hours of the day when the job centre is closed and the defibrillator locked away.

We also want to know in what sense the defibrillator is 鈥渁utomated鈥�. Does it have an internal AI and robotic arm, so it can snake out of its container and zap unwitting jobseekers?

Feeling resigned

Speaking of rogue AIs, readers may recall the actions of Anthropic鈥檚 Jacob Coxon, who on : 鈥淚 resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.鈥�

Feedback had a bit about this, but it was cut from a previous column because the editors said not enough people would get the reference. Feedback has reluctantly accepted the strong evidence, including book sales and talking to a normal person, that while many people have read J. R. R. Tolkien鈥檚 fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, far fewer have read his mythological epic The Silmarillion.

The Silmarillion is, we concede, pretty complicated. However, the essence is simple enough. There is a dark lord called Melkor. Melkor has a servant called Sauron, and they hang out in a fortress called Angband doing evil things. This includes creating the Urul脫ki, more commonly known as dragons.

A lot of tech bros appear to have read this, although Feedback isn鈥檛 sure they have understood it fully. Famously, the surveillance company Palantir is named for the magical seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings, a strong choice given that only two (speaking) characters make heavy use of the Palantir: one goes evil and the other sets himself on fire.

However, at least some readers of Tolkien do appear to have understood his works. Writing on Threads, a fan who goes simply by 鈥渂ree鈥� wrote the , which seems to Feedback to cut to the heart of the matter: 鈥淚 resigned from Angband today. I spent the last three centuries doing metaphysical research for both Sauron and Melkor. Neither dark lord is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to wing猫d Urul脫ki and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.鈥�

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week鈥檚 and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

When antidepressants were created nearly 40 years ago, they were expected to be a breakthrough in treating mental illness. Instead, rates of depression have kept rising. Why? Perhaps because we are missing the bigger picture.

There is tremendous evidence that lifestyle changes can treat depression. Exercise is effective, and dietary changes can be just as valuable as the most evidence-backed therapy. As psychologist Kimberley Wilson shows, proper nutrition makes it easier for people to control their emotions, and eating omega-3 is linked with a reduced risk of depression and suicidal ideation.

The antidepressant-backed mental health model was intended to be rigorous, mimicking methods in physical healthcare. But it was also political, with US mental health researchers receiving less funding to explore the social factors around mental health under President Richard Nixon. Decades on, practitioners like Wilson are finally challenging this approach and, this time, physical health can learn from holistic mental healthcare.

We need to engage with our whole body and mind to be well, not just rely on drugs

Indeed, nearly every aspect of health benefits hugely from engaging with lifestyle and community. Instead of seeing health problems as something to be fixed with drugs, we need to engage with our whole body and mind to be well.

That isn鈥檛 to say medication can鈥檛 play a role. GLP-1s are just a recent example of a medication that has had a dramatic impact in helping people grapple with diabetes and cardiovascular health, as well as depression and low self-esteem. Children are also increasingly being prescribed GLP-1s. But even cutting-edge medical research now recognises that our understanding of health needs to be less fragmented. Researchers are increasingly aware of the gut-brain axis, the heart-brain axis and other interconnected systems that affect our health.

No one cell, organ or person becomes ill in isolation. The more we start to understand our health as a reflection of our whole being, community and society, the healthier we will be.

鈥淎 giant asteroid strike, global warming, a new plague, or nanomachines going rogue and turning everything into grey goo.鈥� This was a list of the biggest threats we faced, as predicted by a feature to mark New 女生小视频鈥檚 60th birthday in 2016. 鈥淎nother threat is artificial intelligence,鈥� we wrote. At least we dodged the asteroid (if only just).

As we prepare to celebrate the big 7-0 in a little under two months鈥� time (you may have noticed we鈥檝e had a little glow-up for the occasion), those threats may feel familiar, but the challenges we face as individuals and as society are even more pressing.聽

2016 was the year that the Paris Agreement went into force, with the ambition of limiting global warming to 1.5掳C above pre-industrial levels. In 2024, the planet breached that line for a full calendar year for the first time. With a powerful El Ni帽o on top of an already warmer planet, 2026 is set to surpass that record, accompanied by heatwaves, wildfires, landslides and other catastrophic events.

A decade ago, Donald Trump鈥檚 election was shocking, but his second term has seen stronger anti-science rhetoric than ever, driving not only cuts to funding but also dangerous misinformation 鈥� in particular with regard to health and the 别苍惫颈谤辞苍尘别苍迟.听

As for AI, it seems we are in a moment of reckoning. In a recent turn of events, even those developing it now warn that the technology could threaten humanity itself, one, its effects are already here, changing everything from the way we work and warfare to the way that people get their news.

For many publishers, this last point poses an existential risk in itself, with audiences increasingly turning to pre-digested AI summaries and social media pundits for their information, and no news publisher is immune.

Yet at a time when science, truth and journalism are all under threat from multiple directions, the importance of science journalism, and especially the high-quality, trusted and sceptical brand of journalism that New 女生小视频 was built on, is stronger than ever.

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There are many more reasons for optimism, too. The past 70 years have seen transformational changes in medicine, green technologies that can help us live more sustainably, and astonishing advances in our understanding of the universe. We will celebrate many of these in our anniversary coverage in the coming weeks, along with our predictions for what the biggest breakthroughs of the future will look like. We鈥檒l also be sharing life-affirming stories from readers, some of whom have been with us from the very beginning.

And let鈥檚 not forget the fun 鈥� this is a birthday, after all. The party begins properly in under two weeks, when tens of thousands of you descend on London for our annual event, , which turns 10 this year.

As for the rest of the year, and the next one, and the one after that: none of us can truly predict what the future holds, but whatever is in store, we plan to still be covering it in 2096. New 女生小视频 may be turning 70, but retirement is firmly off the cards.聽聽

Emergency briefing on the nature and climate crisis

Hear from three of the world鈥檚 leading climate scientists at New 女生小视频 Live 2026

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

A little catty

Feedback鈥檚 felines are often nowhere to be seen. For hours at a time 鈥� in the case of the more free-range cat, sometimes several days 鈥� they vanish from sight. What might they be doing? Torturing the local small-animal population perhaps, or chasing fallen leaves around the yard, or visiting the local school to cause as much disruption to learning as possible, or perhaps just lazing in a warm spot to sleep. But who knows?

One person who does know is at Massey University in New Zealand, because she and her colleagues put collar-mounted accelerometers on cats to follow their movements. Feedback learned of this from the newspaper, which reported the from the journal Pets on 12 September under the heading 鈥淧aws for thought: Science proves your cat really is that lazy鈥�.

Smit鈥檚 team tracked 10 indoor pet cats and 18 free-roaming pets, as well as eight cats living semi-outdoors in research facilities. Their behaviours were grouped into eight categories: 鈥渁ctive (walking and trotting), eating, grooming, littering, lying, scratching, sitting, and standing鈥�. Presumably the data was insufficiently granular to capture other cat behaviours such as 鈥減ushing breakable objects off furniture onto hard floors鈥� and 鈥渋nexplicably hissing at one鈥檚 human after having previously been pleased with a cuddle鈥�.

The most mobile cats were free-roaming pets: in summer, they were active a full 3.9 per cent of the time, though this fell to 2.7 per cent in winter. The indoor and research cats spent even less active time. Littering and scratching took up very little time, less than 1 per cent each. Instead, overall, the cats devoted between 2.4 and 7.8 per cent of their time to eating, 4.6 to 7.9 per cent to grooming, and 9.3 to 15.6 per cent to standing.

If you鈥檝e been keeping track, you already know there鈥檚 a whole lot of day left. This the cats reserved for their two primary activities. Sitting occupied them for 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time, while a whopping 34.8 to 52.9 per cent went to the really important one: lying.

Feedback would say something about this, but first we鈥檙e going to lie down for 4 to 6 hours.

Truncations, extended

Feedback is on a quest to compile a definitive database of unfortunate abbreviations triggered by technological systems, such as the 鈥渟uggested follow鈥� box on social media that shortened the name of the Stroke Association charity by eight letters. Two more have come our way.

Some years ago, writer Dave Appleby was delighted to have been promoted to assistant headteacher. Soon after, 鈥淚 applied to attend a conference and proudly filled in my new title on the form where it asked for 鈥榡ob role鈥�. 鈥� But Dave was in for a rough experience. 鈥淎rriving at the venue, I spent the day meeting other attendees with the name badge pinned to my chest: Dave Appleby, Ass Head.鈥� Fortunately, no pupils were present.

Meanwhile, Mike Petty sent us a one-sentence email we will simply reproduce in full because we have nothing to add (and anyway, adding material seems contrary to the spirit of the exercise). 鈥淲hen I and colleagues set up in business in 1997 as Loughborough Surface Analysis Ltd, little did we realise that for many years to come the default length for the organisation-name field on conference name-badges would be 25 characters [including spaces].鈥�

Into the wild

It has been over a year since Feedback last checked in on MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber on account of having worked very hard to become popular. Wondering what he might be up to these days, we discovered he has started a

The tech giant announced on 2 September that MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) is 鈥渢apping into Gemini to help him execute wilder concepts, showing his fans how they can use AI to help turn impossibly big ideas into reality鈥�.

Gemini, of course, is Google鈥檚 own-brand AI tool. In MrBeast鈥檚 using Gemini, he and his wife, friends and colleagues split into three teams and race across the Amazon (not all of it), the Arctic (likewise) and a desert to reach rescue helicopters. They use Gemini to help them identify hazards and come up with ways to survive.

By the way, while the official announcement mentions the Arctic, the video repeatedly says that the people in the chilly place were in the Antarctic, so Feedback isn鈥檛 entirely clear which end of the planet they went to. Details, amirite?

Anyway, a little over 5 minutes into the 23-minute video and didn鈥檛 find any instances of them using Gemini. At this point we had got so bored of the constant updates on how far each team had got that we stopped watching.

Our main interest in the video came about due to the by Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, claiming the odds were higher than 10 per cent that AI would 鈥渒ill all humans鈥� in the next decade.

Extrapolating, we wondered whether MrBeast鈥檚 Gemini video might be his last. However, it was titled 鈥淚 Survived The Most Extreme Places On Earth鈥�, so we assume he made it. However, if his Google deal requires him to make 10 or more videos, the odds are against him.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week鈥檚 and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.