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.

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 If you want to succeed in science, it helps to have good ideas, to be good at experiments, and so forth. But what you really need is a knack for a good acronym. If you can come up with a string of words that describes your project, and also abbreviates to form a word, you're golden.