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
Doubling up
If the internet is to be believed (it’s not), a growing proportion of celebrities have been replaced by clones.
The latest to allegedly have their body snatched is actor Jim Carrey, star of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and other cinematic miracles. Carrey attended the 51st César Awards in Paris on 26 February, his first public appearance for some time, and he looked a bit different compared with before. One might think that this would be attributed to some combination of ageing and cosmetic procedures, but instead, a conspiracy theory formed that the person wasn’t Carrey, but a clone.
Whoever is doing all this celebrity body snatching, they are busy: Carrey’s replacement follows those of Paul McCartney (supposedly dead since 1966 and replaced by a stand-in) and Avril Lavigne (allegedly dead since 2003). You would think that, by now, they would have got better at concealing their nefarious activities.
Feedback has tried to think through the logistics of creating a useable clone of the star of Dumb and Dumber To. To our knowledge, nobody has ever successfully cloned a human, so there’s that. But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose there is an illicit cloning lab in Hollywood, perhaps in a seedy apartment somewhere on Mulholland Drive, that can do it. There is still a big problem.
To whit: if one were to somehow clone Carrey, perhaps harvesting his cells from the set of the forthcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 4, that clone would emerge from the vat as a baby. It would then take 64 years to grow up to look like Carrey does now, by which time he would be 128 years old, and presumably 6 feet under.
At the risk of adding to the trauma of Star Trek fans, who have just seen the latest television series summarily cancelled, there was once a terrible film called Star Trek: Nemesis in which the baddies had produced a clone of Captain Picard and were planning to replace him. To make this work, they had to genetically engineer the clone to undergo accelerated ageing. And even with 24th-century technology, this didn’t properly work.
Feedback infers from this that a present-day cloning conspiracy might experience technical barriers.
Steel for lunch
Feedback isn’t one for fancy restaurants. Their chief benefit, we feel, is the enjoyment we obtain from reading a really scathing takedown by a restaurant critic fed up of still being hungry after 18 perfectly plated tiny portions.
Hence we were unaware of sonic seasoning, which is the emerging practice of using carefully chosen sounds to enhance the experience of the food. This builds on the science of sensory cross-modality: the fact that our senses cross-connect in the brain, creating peculiar correspondences between, say, sound and smell. For some people, this leads to synaesthesia, where colours can evoke tastes and so forth. But even if you aren’t a synaesthete, the sounds the restaurant plays can affect your experience of the food.
Writer Chris Simms alerts us to the latest offering in this field, from Charles Spence and Tianyi Zhang at the University of Oxford. They set out to identify “a musical match for the metallic taste”, which previously hadn’t been identified, “nor looked for”.
With graceful inevitability, the sound “strongly associated with a metallic taste” was, of course, “the sound of the theremin, associated with old sci-fi movies”. For those unfamiliar with the theremin, it’s an electronic instrument that the musician doesn’t touch. Instead, there are two antennas, and the musician moves their hands in the space near them. Thanks to electromagnetism, this generates an unearthly wail ideally suited to the creepier kind of science fiction.
Feedback was going to say that this explains why we taste lead whenever we hear the original theme from Star Trek, but we double-checked and there’s no theremin on that recording, so that’s evidently just our wonky brain. We then fell down a rabbit hole of recordings that are popularly believed to feature theremins but actually don’t, which include the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet and the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations.
All this investigating has made Feedback hungry, so we’re off in search of lunch. What is the best sonic match for leftover pizza?
Pass the bear
Just when we think that there is no more nominative determinism to be found, reader Richard Black comes up with a truly intricate example.
It started when he read a recent column by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on the question “What is a galaxy?” Chanda mentioned a paper by astronomer Simon Smith, reporting the discovery of a cluster of stars called Ursa Major III. It gets its name because, as seen from Earth, it lies within the constellation of Ursa Major, or the great bear.
Richard writes: “My mind (being of advanced years) immediately jumped to a song [performed] by Alan Price called ‘Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear’ which is instantly stuck in my head now.” We’re not sure if this is truly nominative determinism or just a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but either way the connection is in our head and now it’s in yours, too.
Regardless, to forestall any emails complaining that it doesn’t really count, we have been informed by reader Richard Bartlett that the head coach of Leicester City women’s football team is Rick Passmoor.
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