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.

In 2008, the journalist Jonah Lehrer paid a visit to a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, to profile Henry Markram, a world-renowned neuroscientist. Markram, a South African, had trained at a series of élite institutions in Israel, the United States, and Germany; in the nineties, he published foundational papers on neural connections and synaptic activity. Markram's work in the laboratory, which involved piercing neural membranes with what Lehrer described as an "invisibly sharp glass pipette," was known for its painstaking precision. Lehrer's visit, however, had been occasioned not by Markram's incremental contributions to the field--it's not easy to sell a colorful profile on the basis of such publications as "The neural code between neocortical pyramidal neurons depends on neurotransmitter release probability"--but by Markram's pivot, in the early two-thousands, to brain simulation. Neuroscience, Markram declaimed to Lehrer, had reached an impasse. Researchers had generated an enormous wealth of fine-grained data, but the marginal returns had begun to diminish.

Marc Kaufman typically needs 20 hours to create one patent application for a software innovation. But the Washington-based patent attorney says he's saving valuable time with a little high-tech help. Kaufman, a partner at Rimon PC, has been using an artificial intelligence tool called Specifio that analyzes claims--words that define an invention--and generates a bare-bones draft with a description and illustrations in a couple of minutes. He says the tool he started using six months ago has given him five extra hours to fine-tune his clients' applications to boost their likelihood of approval. "Saving hours allows me to really understand the client's business and be very strategic with the patent application, while coming in at a price that clients are willing to pay," Kaufman said.