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
It is a gas
Feedback feels bold, so here’s a prediction: the research we’re about to describe will win an Ig Nobel Prize within the next decade. The whole project feels tailor-made for Igs. It is an attempt to objectively measure human flatulence using biosensors, or “Smart Underwear”.
We learned about this from a press release from the University of Maryland, flagged to us by physics reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan with the phrase, “Sure, feedback can do something about this.”
The significant problem is that we do not know the normal range for flatulence, unlike other important biomarkers such as blood sugar. Most studies have relied on self-reporting, which doesn’t really work because people often don’t remember all of their farts and are poor judges of how big each one was. In addition, there is the “impossibility of logging gas while you sleep”: anyone who has shared a bed with someone else knows that everyone farts in their sleep.
Hence Smart Underwear developed by Brantley Hall and colleagues. The press release calls it “a small wearable device that attaches discreetly to any underwear and uses electrochemical sensors to track intestinal gas production around the clock”. In case you’re wondering what constituted “small” in this context, Feedback checked the scientific article and it turns out that the sensor is 26 × 29 × 9 millimeters – which we admit is quite small, but participants in the experiment may want to avoid skinny jeans.
Based on the first round of studies, “healthy adults produced flatus an average of 32 times per day,” which is about twice as often as previously thought. People vary widely, however: daily totals varied between four and 59 farts.
As Smart Underwear is rolled out more widely, the data it collects will feed into a larger project, the Human Flatus Atlas. This has a website (flatus.info) where you can register to have your speeds tracked. Participants are enticed with the prospect of discovering whether they are a Hydrogen Hyperproducer, a Zen Digester who barely farts even on a diet of baked beans, or somewhere in between.
Feedback wonders how resistant the sensors are to significant farts. We recently learned of a gentleman who visited a French hospital after having an unexploded World War I grenade lodged in his bottom, forcing staff to operate with the assistance of a bomb squad. We guess anything coming from that quarter may have been too much for Smart Underwear.
Meanwhile, the lead researchers have founded VentosCity to exploit the technology. The website is minimal, just an animation of some gas, a slogan (“Measure. Master. Thrive”) and a promise: “The future of gut health is coming soon”. Feedback suspects the imminent arrival of an app with a monthly subscription.
Ghost in the machine
As AI companies introduce their technology into every aspect of our lives, we need help understanding it. Since most of us don’t really get AI, and don’t come without a crash course in pretty advanced math, we turn to metaphors and analogies.
Feedback has been made aware of some literary devices that can help readers wrap their heads around the AI phenomenon.
First, someone who goes hikikomorphism on Bluesky suggested the phrase “hungry ghost trapped in a jar” as a guide to whether you’re using AI sensibly. She says that if you can replace “hungry ghost trapped in a jar” with “AI” in your description of what you’re doing and it still makes sense, you’re probably using AI in a plausible way.
“Take ‘I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me’. Sure. Reasonable use case,” hikikomorphism writes. “‘My boyfriend is a hungry ghost I caught in a jar’? No. Deranged.”
Second, we’re now confronted with endless AI-written content that we didn’t ask for: fake romance novels, AI summaries of search queries, AI summaries of meetings, just AI everything. We need a way to summarize our reaction to these texts.
Well, one of the most popular abbreviations of the internet age is “tl;dr”, which stands for “too long, didn’t read”. Hence the new phrase “ai;dr”, the meaning of which should be clear from the context.
Finally, feedback has been flooded with anecdotes of people using AI to perform important tasks, only to have it botched in spectacular ways. Maybe you’ve seen the one where the venture capitalist asks an AI tool to organize the desktop of his wife’s computer, only for it to say “ooops” because it had deleted 15 years of photos (he later got them back).
Or the one where the AI hallucinates three months of analysis data.
With these stories in mind, we’ll give the final word to author Nick Pettigrew. He wrote on Bluesky: “I am convinced that AI is the radium of our generation – a discovery with genuinely useful applications under specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put into everything from children’s toys to toothpaste until we realized the damage far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.”
Feedback had more to say about this, but our AI deleted it – a phrase that’s sure to become the new “the dog ate my homework.”
Cue bites
Somehow feedback has gone all these years without learning of the existence of quantum information theorist Toby Cubitt.
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