When neural networks name planets, they call them Tina

If a sci-fi film ever names a planet Tina, blame Janelle Shane. Her hobby is training neural networks on data sets to create amusing names, be it rescue kittens ("Mag Jeggles" and "Snox Boops"), Pokémon ("Tortabool"), and -- perhaps most famously -- paint colours ("Sudden Pine" and "Turdly"). In the latest round, the neural network was trained on 700 planets from Star Wars. That's worth doing, she says, because "Kepler-452b" isn't catchy enough to shout out to "the ship's engineer during a raging ion storm", and there's thousands of exoplanets that need better names. After feeding in the data supplied by a fan, her neural network spat out better suggestions, such as "Bartan", "Vantos" and "Nananon".