Feedback is New Scientist popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you think might entertain readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Aster enomers
The feedback is shocking – shocked – to learn that a grove of trees in northern Italy did not actually predict a solar eclipse.
Now we know what will be going through most readers’ minds at this point: “Are you saying that someone thought trees could really predict a solar eclipse?” To which the answer is “surprisingly, yes”.
The partial solar eclipse in question occurred on October 25, 2022. Prior to this, botanists led by Alessandro Chiolerio had inserted electrodes into spruce trees to monitor their bioelectrical activity. In April 2025, they reported their findings: “Trees predicted the eclipse, synchronizing their bioelectrical behavior hours in advance. Older trees showed greater predictive behavior with early time asymmetry and entropy increases.”
With graceful inevitability here comes the revelation, published in Trends in Plant Science February 6 and flagged to us by reporter Matthew Sparkes (who should be getting some sort of fee for the number of items he’s contributed to Feedback).
Authors Ariel Novoplansky and Hezi Yizhaq point out that the drop in sunlight during the partial eclipse was too small to affect the trees: their leaves were still saturated with sunlight. Furthermore, eclipses of this type repeat in a cycle of just over 18 years. The oldest trees in the study were about 70 years old, so they could only have lived through wood, which doesn’t seem like enough to have learned the pattern, especially since eclipses take different paths across the Earth’s surface.
Feedback has read the original study and we’re not sure it was necessary to go into such depth to debunk it. The team connected only three trees and five stumps. Size isn’t everything, but sample size does matter.
There is also a long section in the article on “Theoretical Analysis of Quantum Field Theory”. Yes, that’s the Q word! “Trees are openand thus dissipativesystems, which continuously exchange (release and receive) matter and energy in various forms with the environment,” it explains. “In addition, they are aging systems, the origin of the time of their lives cannot be moved and their time evolution (the arrow of time) cannot be inverted…” There is much more, but after the first paragraph, Feedback felt that we quantumly jumped into a state of not wanting to read more.
Even so, it is the coincidence that the electrical activities of the trees are synchronized during the 14 hours before the eclipse. How can we explain this? Novoplansky and Yizhaq have a proposal. “A total of 664 lightning strikes occurred from October 22 to 25, 2022,” they write. That includes three attacks within 10 kilometers of the site and within 14 hours before the eclipse. Maybe that had something to do with it.
Don’t spill
Continuing our themes of “people being foolish send us press releases” and “they would say so, wouldn’t they”, feedback has been told some good news about tea.
“The latest scientific research reveals that drinking a cup of tea daily benefits the heart, in addition to growing evidence to support cholesterol levels, blood pressure, inflammation and blood clotting,” it appears. This is good news for Feedback, as we consume quite a bit of tea, and even better for Mrs Feedback, whose bloodstream is about 70 per cent tea.
Who are the bearers of this good news? Why, the Tea Advisory Panel, of course. Feedback was not previously aware of the Tea Advisory Panel, but their website informs us that it is “supported by a (sic) limited educational grant from the UK TEA & INFUSIONS ASSOCIATION, the trade association for the UK tea industry”. The panel exists “to provide the media with unbiased information about the health benefits of tea”.
Hence the statements that conclude the press release: “Previous research has shown that the sweet spot is four cups of tea a day … Yet only a third of Britons (35%) said they drank three to four cups of tea a day … Therefore, our challenge as tea experts and nutritionists is to ensure that the message about the heart health benefits of tea is clearly communicated to the public.” Feedback will say more, but we really want an espresso.
Universal and free
In our ongoing quest to find the best and worst examples of technical acronyms, Feedback came across a wonderful initiative started by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
The basic idea is simple enough. There are an awful lot of construction-based toys, from Lego to Stickle Bricks. However, they are not interoperable: with a few exceptions, you cannot connect parts from two different systems.
Hence Golan Levin and Shawn Sims’ decision to create open source 3D printable adapters, which can merge the parts from different construction systems. If you have a 3D printer, you can download the designs for free and make your own chimeric toys.
It’s all quite delicious. The designers explain that their purpose was to enable “radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for children”, to offer “a public service that is not met – or unfulfilled – by corporate interests”.
Feedback seems that this set deserves to be used a lot. However, we suspect that its appeal to parents is somewhat limited by the creators’ decision to call it the Free Universal Construction Kit.
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