Think of a card, any card – but make it science

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

Online psychics

If you are engaged in pseudoscience, it isn’t a good idea to send Feedback a press release about it. We will only make fun of you. We issue this advice in the happy knowledge that nobody who is practising pseudoscience can admit they are doing so. Therefore we will continue to receive these unwittingly revelatory missives.

It is our pleasure to introduce you to the Global Telepathy Study – that is, if the knowledge of its existence hadn’t already materialised in your brain. This is an exercise in “crowd-scale ESP testing”, which aims to demonstrate the phenomenon of extrasensory perception on a global scale.

As its website trueesp.com explains: “This research study utilizes the free True ESP app to synchronize the brain waves of participants around the world with multi-sensory stimulation during real-time telepathy tests.” Once you have the app, you can take part in 4-minute telepathy tests.

Participants take turns to either mentally transmit an image, chosen from a set of nine cards, or to receive it. “A new test begins every ten minutes around-the-clock, and users can participate as often as they want,” the site excitedly announces.

Feedback is old, so we have heard of Joseph Rhine: the 20th-century parapsychologist who pioneered the use of Zener cards, which had five easily distinguishable images that people would try to transmit telepathically. Rhine claimed that people succeeded more often than chance would suggest, except that they often reverted to chance under continued or more rigorous testing – almost as if the initial successes were pure luck. The Global Telepathy Study is basically repeating Rhine’s experiments, but with an app.

The study has been organised by one Mark Freeman, who has a background in advertising and “brings an extraordinary level of innovation and integrity to the Global Telepathy Study”. He is joined by a quartet of scientists, chief of whom is Dean Radin, who “was a scientist with the CIA’s top-secret Stargate program, which trained an army of psychic spies for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 1980s and 1990s”. Feedback regrets to inform you that the Stargate programme really existed.

Long-term Feedback readers may be asking themselves: where is the word “quantum” in all of this? Fear not, it’s there. Careful exploration of the website reveals a section on “Quantum ESP Research“, which explains that “New experiments show that brain neurons create consciousness through quantum entanglement”.

Feedback will continue to report the results of this experiment until morale improves, or until Freeman realises he should stop sending us emails about it, whichever is soonest.

Tricky dicky

Reader Peter Slessenger was reading about US President Donald Trump’s health, as one does these days, when he came across an article from HuffPost, republished by Yahoo News.

It reported that Jonathan Reiner, a health analyst on CNN, had called for Trump to have another medical assessment because he seemed to keep falling asleep in meetings and at events.

To establish Reiner’s credentials, the article noted that he had previously served as cardiologist to “the late Vice President **** Cheney”. Something, someone, somewhere had decided that the name “Dick” was unprintable.

In its original article, HuffPost dares to call him “Dick Cheney”, so it must be Yahoo News that is ****phobic.

Honorary dogtorate

Universities will hand out honorary degrees to just about anyone with a pulse and a social media following, but Feedback was nevertheless taken aback to see the following announcement from Griffith University in Australia: “Griffith University is delighted to announce that renowned archaeologist and 2019 Father of the Year Dr. Bandit Heeler has been offered a professorial chair.”

We were surprised because Bandit is a fictional animated dog from the children’s TV show Bluey. The university goes on to describe him as “a Brisbane-based blue heeler of international repute” and cites “his fieldwork in remote jungles of Indonesia, his landmark publications on the ritual significance of dance-mode freezing in pre-literate societies, and his seminal studies on the development of a language capacity in the Cockapoo”, not to mention “his work on the evolution of the first dogs to walk upright”. We have no idea when Bandit is meant to have achieved all this, given that he spends all his time playing make-believe with Bluey and Bingo. Truly, he is a multitasker.

Further reading reveals that the honorary doctorate was actually given to Bluey‘s creator Joe Brumm, whose brother Adam is a palaeoanthropologist at the university. This leads Feedback to worry that our own family isn’t achieving enough.

Bye bye burger

Several cultivated meat companies have gone out of business in the past few months, including Meatable and Believer Meats.

Reader Hue White suspects he has the explanation for the failure of Believer Meats: “the wrong CEO”.

This has certainly been a problem for some companies, but Hue says Believer Meats missed the clues. “They should have guessed it from his name: Gustavo Burger.”

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