Feedback has spent some time sifting through 2025's key scientific achievements to come up with a range of weird and wonderful (and less wonderful) winners for our inaugural Backsies awards Being a New Scientist reader, you are probably savvy enough to realise that end-of-year roundups are written weeks ahead of time. This particular summation was drafted on 1 December, just as Feedback was preparing to spend 24 days avoiding hearing Wham's Last Christmas and trying to persuade Feedback Jr to make their mind up on what they want for their main present. Anything radically silly that may have happened after that date will have to wait until next year. Truly, 2025 has been rich in all the things Feedback is interested in. We learned about fascinating proposals like nuking the seabed to stop climate change, a notion that went straight into our Do Not Recommend pile.

AOC hit by shockingly crude sex insult by White House after she mocked'TINY' Stephen Miller Biden ordered CIA cover-up of his'corrupt' business ties to Ukraine, astonishing secret files show NYC girls aged 12 and 13 meet tragic end after going subway surfing across Williamsburg Bridge at 3.10am ERIC TRUMP: The darkest day in my dad's marriage to Melania... before the ugly truth was exposed More girls are starting their periods younger than ever before - scientists think they've finally found what's causing it Taylor Swift reveals truth behind raunchy song about Travis Kelce's manhood Meghan is accused of'giggling as model stumbles on the catwalk': More Paris Fashion Week disasters emerge, including awkward moment with Kristin Scott Thomas The TRUTH to the doting mother who slaughtered her children and husband told by those she'd been quietly tormenting for years The troubled background of delivery man stabbed by Mark Sanchez... as he launches million-dollar lawsuit and sparks civil war at Fox Revealed: Which slimming jab REALLY works best. The doctors' ultimate expert guide on which to pick, how to save money, beat every side effect... and what you need to know about the'golden dose' I haven't heard that name in so long' Ominous warning for humanity as birds suddenly adopt'unsettling' behavior And a humiliating lifeline: Backroom secrets of Taylor Swift and Blake Lively... after hit new song Bottled water contains dangerous levels of microplastics that lodge in vital organs and raise cancer risk', scientists warn Sea level rise could plunge 100 MILLION buildings underwater, warn scientists - so, is your home at risk? Rising sea levels could plunge more than 100 million buildings underwater by 2100, scientists have warned. The experts in Canada estimated how many buildings in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America would be flooded by different sea level changes. Their assessment found that sea level rises of just 1.6 feet (0.5 metres) would flood three million buildings in the global south alone.

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 Science is one of the most fruitful sources of new terminology. There's nothing like a surfeit of terms like "mitochondrial synthesis" and "quantum fluctuations" to make your writing sound authoritative Recently there has been a spate of scientific papers containing the phrase "vegetative electron microscopy/microscope". The term suggests a device for scanning broccoli, but it is utter nonsense. There are scanning electron microscopes and tunnelling electron microscopes, but not vegetative electron microscopes.

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 Some things are sadly inevitable: death, taxes, another Coldplay album. One such inevitability, long since proved beyond any reasonable doubt, is that if you try to suppress an embarrassing story, you will only draw more attention to it. This phenomenon is called the Streisand Effect, after an incident in 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued to have an aerial photograph taken off the internet.

Muslims around the world have begun celebrating Eid al-Fitr, one of the biggest celebrations in the Islamic calendar. Eid al-Fitr - which means "festival of the breaking of the fast" - is celebrated at the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting for many adults, as well as spiritual reflection and prayer.ReutersHere in Moscow, worshippers are seen preparing for prayer.ReutersHundreds took part in prayers at Tononoka grounds, in Mombasa, KenyaGetty ImagesPrayers were also observed at a stadium in Port Sudan in the east of the countryGetty ImagesLittle children joined adults at the Moskee Essalam in Rotterdam, NetherlandsGetty ImagesGifts are handed out to Muslim children in Lviv, Ukraine, as Russia's war on the country continuesReuters Palestinians in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip pray amidst the rubble of a mosque destroyed in the current war between Israel and HamasGetty ImagesFamilies gather at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem - the third holiest site in IslamReutersA boy yawns during prayers at a stadium in QatarEPAMuslims greet each-other at Martim Moniz Square in Lisbon, PortugalGetty ImagesWomen worshippers gather in Burgess Park, London, for an outdoor prayerEPAThere were also worshippers gathered outside Plebiscito Square in Naples, ItalyReutersSome women took pictures after attending prayers at the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in Istanbul, TurkeyGetty ImagesAfghan refugees pray at a mosque on the outskirts of Peshawar, PakistanMiddle EastEuropeEid al-FitrReligionIslamRelated'I was afraid for my life': At the scene of the attack on Palestinian Oscar winner 5 days agoMiddle EastMore8 hrs ago'In Bradford, families spend thousands on new clothes for Eid' Muslims spend large amounts in Bradford's supermarkets, clothes shops and other services before Eid.8 hrs agoEngland1 day ago The tourist has received an award from the city's mayor after restraining a man during a stabbing.1 day agoEurope1 day ago Another 21 people are injured, as a restaurant and several buildings are set ablaze in the city, local officials say.1 day agoWorld1 day ago Town's successful Ramadan lights project expanded A Scunthorpe community group says it has seen an "amazing" response to its lights display.1 day agoLincolnshire1 day ago Bishop says school that changed Easter events'valued' The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

The idea of entire cities being plunged underwater might sound like the plot of the latest science fiction blockbuster. But it could become a reality in just 75 years, according to a terrifying new study. Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have predicted that global sea levels could rise by a staggering 6.2 feet (1.9 metres) by 2100 if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to increase. 'The high-end projection of 1.9 metres underscores the need for decision-makers to plan for critical infrastructure accordingly,' said Dr Benjamin Grandey, lead author of the study. If global sea levels were to rise by 6.2ft (1.9 metres), towns and cities around the world could be plunged underwater - including several in the UK.

It is common to reject undesired outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs); however, current methods to do so require an excessive amount of computation, or severely distort the distribution of outputs. We present a method to balance the distortion of the output distribution with computational efficiency, allowing for the generation of long sequences of text with difficult-to-satisfy constraints, with less amplification of low probability outputs compared to existing methods. We show through a series of experiments that the task-specific performance of our method is comparable to methods that do not distort the output distribution, while being much more computationally efficient. Language models sometimes generate undesirable outputs, such as syntactically-incorrect code, hallucinated PII, or profanity. These conditions, which we collectively refer to as errors for the remainder of the paper, can be detected with incremental parsers, regular expression matching, or even simple substring searches. However, once detection occurs, there are several competing methods for mitigating errors in the output. One set of methods, constrained generation (Beurer-Kellner et al., 2024; Geng et al., 2024; Melcer et al., 2024), avoids errors by disabling the generation of any token that immediately leads to such an error. While this method is effective, it can lead to the amplification of low-probability outputs. Another class of methods avoids errors without any amplification of low-probability outputs, at the cost of additional computation. Rejection sampling is the simplest such method; i.e. if the output contains an error, simply generate another sample until the output is acceptable. Adaptive Sampling with Approximate Expected Futures (ASAp) (Park et al., 2024) provides a performance improvement over rejection sampling while maintaining the output distribution by effectively sampling without replacement, but there are still many situations in which it may converge too slowly. In our experiments, we show that our method obtains task-specific performance on par with ASAp, while converging significantly faster when the constraints are difficult to satisfy. We first describe autoregressive language models and their properties.

Abstractive summarization aims at generating natural language summaries of a source document that are succinct while preserving the important elements. Despite recent advances, neural text summarization models are known to be susceptible to hallucinating (or more correctly confabulating), that is to produce summaries with details that are not grounded in the source document. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet efficient technique, CoBa, to reduce hallucination in abstractive summarization. The approach is based on two steps: hallucination detection and mitigation. We show that the former can be achieved through measuring simple statistics about conditional word probabilities and distance to context words. Further, we demonstrate that straight-forward backtracking is surprisingly effective at mitigation. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed method with prior art on three benchmark datasets for text summarization. The results show that CoBa is effective and efficient in reducing hallucination, and offers great adaptability and flexibility.

Evaluating automatically-generated text summaries is a challenging task. While there have been many interesting approaches, they still fall short of human evaluations. We present RISE, a new approach for evaluating summaries by leveraging techniques from information retrieval. RISE is first trained as a retrieval task using a dual-encoder retrieval setup, and can then be subsequently utilized for evaluating a generated summary given an input document, without gold reference summaries. RISE is especially well suited when working on new datasets where one may not have reference summaries available for evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the SummEval benchmark (Fabbri et al., 2021) and the results show that RISE has higher correlation with human evaluations compared to many past approaches to summarization evaluation. Furthermore, RISE also demonstrates data-efficiency and generalizability across languages.

Antarctica's Thwaites glacier has warm water from three directions well under it threatening to destroy the ice sheet and raise global sea levels by up to two feet. A team of scientists from Oregon State University made the most of ice free waters in West Antarctica to look under the glacier - which is about the size of Great Britain. Warm water from the deep ocean is welling up under the glacier from three different directions and mixing under the ice, the researchers discovered. If it collapses it could take other parts of the ice shelf with it and lead to the single largest driver of sea-level rise this century, lead researcher Erin Pettit told Nature. The £39million study involving UK and US scientists was launched after concerns the increasingly unstable glacier may have already started to collapse.