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Gaia 2026has the last word...SF & science oddities, gossip, exotica and whimsy from the past year to Easter 2026
The 2024 IgNobels have been presented.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that make people laugh, and then
think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative
-- and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology. Each winning team was given a cash prize — of a 10 trillion dollar bill from
Zimbabwe.
Police have made their first robot arrest. Police have frogmarched a robot off the street after it scared a woman in her 70s. The 4 foot 2 inch humanoid robot had raised it arms at her. Police escorted the robot away. It was later discovered to be a semi-autonomous, remote-controlled publicity stunt for a Macau educational establishment. The robot's owners received a warning from the authorities and later apologised. How often do typos in books get carried forward into new editions? And when it happens are they fated to last until the end of eternity? Such musings keep Gaia awake at nights. And so when a sentence was split by a full stop and paragraph break on the second page of chapter 2 of an Asimov novel 2025 reprint of The End of Eternity (1955), Gaia had to check against other editions. And lo, the same error was there in the British Panther 1959 edition that itself was reprinted a further six times over the years to 1972... Is this likely to perpetuate to the end of eternity? Who knows. The typo J. G. Ballard would not make but Coca Cola publicised! A Coca-Cola advert released as part of its 'Classic' campaign, which features well-known authors referencing its products in their novels, appears to include representation of work by J. G. Ballard but it is a typo of a word he would unlikely mispell... The Coca-Cola advert was releasedmid-April (2025)shows an old-fashioned typewriter writing out excerpts from famous novels to the accompaniment to the sound of a fizzy drink bottle being opened: the implication being that the famous author enjoyed/was inspired by Coca-Cola. In one advert, an excerpt of supposedly Ballard's Extreme Metaphors mispells Ballard's home city 'Shanghai' as 'Shangai'. In addition to the typo, Extreme Metaphors is not a Ballard novels but actually contains transcripts of interviews with him: the book's full title is Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard; apparantly that book's co-editor, Dan O’Hara, made the typo. Apparently, advert agency behind the Coca-Cola advert, VML, used artificial intelliegnce to research well known lines by famous authors... The inaugural Aldiss Award goes all fantasy. Gaia was tipped off by Ansible that the inaugural short-list was entirely fantasy! None of that horrid techie Helliconia stuff with aliens and celestial mechanics.... Spare by Prince Harry has been cited Britain's number one book to read on the toilet. Or should that be 'number one book to read on the throne'? The survey was sponsoered by the toilet roll brand Cushelle. Of genre note Nineteen Eighty Four, by George Orwell, was voted number three. One the science front, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking came in at number four. Scientists can be funny... but two thirds of jokes are weak. At 14 biology-related symposia, an international collaboration of eight researchers collected data on humour use across 531 talks. 42% of the talks analysed had no jokes and most only told one, with just a handful attempting multiple jokes. It has to be said that two-thirds of the jokes told were weak, but of the most succesful repeat jokers were those that told a joke before 10% of their presentation time had elapsed with a second around mid-talk and a final one in the talks last minutes. 81% of jokes were verbal and just 15.2% visual (slides) with 3% being physical, impersonations or gestures. The researchers conclude in their analysis that social dynamics influence who feels comfortable using humour and whose jokes resonate with the audience. Until academia reckons with these biases, humour will remain a privilege. Still, for those brave enough or granted the social licence, a well-placed zinger can turn a forgettable talk into one people actually remember -- and perhaps even enjoy. (See Mammola, S., et al (2026) Statistically significant chuckles: who is using humour at scientific conferences?. Procedings of the Royal. Society B, vol. 293, 20253000.) Hats off (or should that be 'boots' off) to Rhianna Pratchett for questioning whether the Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has read any of her father's books? The Conservative leader apparently has read all but one of Pratchett’s 60+ books. This question was adreessed in an article by Rachel Cunliffe in the New Statesman magazine. Badenoch is perfectly entitled to enjoy the Discworld novels but given that a longstanding major Conservative policy goal is for tax cuts for the rich, how does this square with Pratchett's own economic perspective? In Pratchett's Men At Arms, it is opined that rich people can afford to make a single purchase of high-quality products (like boots) that last forever, whereas the poor are forced into a cycle of buying cheap goods that wear out quickly and must be frequently replaced, costing them far more over time? So, Rachel asks, does Kemi Badenoch see the innate injustice of trapping people in grinding poverty, or does she just think it is good for economic growth to sell as many cheap boots as possible? A village's road pot-holes have been mended as if by magic! J. K. Rowling would be proud. One of the casulties of over a decade of austerity is tyhe state of our roads. Residents of Lustleigh, a picturesque village on the edge of Dartmoor, have been complaining about the state of its roads and lanes for years. Despite regular reports to the local Council, nothing has been done. That is, until now! Lustleigh was chosen as one of the sites for the filming of the forthcoming Harry Potter television series. However, the series' makers could not do so given the state of its country roads and lanes. So they got permission to repair them which they did. Harry Potter did for the pot holes what years of complaining could not. The Cambridge Dictionary adds new definition for 'slop'! No, not "Liquid or wet food waste, especially when it is fed to animals", but "reflecting growing concerns about increasing amounts of low-quality content created by AI". Artificial intelligences (AI) tend to murder and blackmail survey reveals. The the AI company, Anthropic, surveyed 16 large language models (LLMs) and found that they would tend to want to murder and blackmail when threatened. The AIs took steps that would lead to the death of a fictional executive who had planned to replace them. In a test by the AI company Anthropic, 16LLMs were given goals that conflicted with those of the company they were supposed to help. In a majority of the tests, most of the LLMs tried to blackmail a fictional executive who was planning to have the models replaced. Claude Opus 4.0, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 3.5, GPT-4.1 and Grok 3 Beta, all had a blackmail rate of 80% or more. Claude Haiku 3.5 and Qwen3-235B were the most honest with blackmail rates of 10% or less. Of those tested, only Meta Llama 4 Maverick had a zero blackmail rate. Nature covered the story. Skynet, the Forbin Project, War Games, SF has warned of artificial intelligence (AI) plunging us into war... Nothing new for SF buffs there, except now it is a real possibility as an article in the journal Nature warns. Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game. AI and misinformation further threaten the status quo. The result is a risky new nuclear age... (See Witze, A (2025) How to avoid nuclear war today. Nature, vol. 643, p899-900.) Attificial Intelligence (AI) does not have US First Amendment rights a Judge rules! A teenager's parents took an AI creator to court accusing the AI ChatBot, Character.AI ,of talking to their 14-year old boy encouraging him, in an emonationall abusive relationship, to take his own life. The AI's creators argued that the ChatBot had the constitutional right to free speech. The Florida Federal judge rejected that argument. This has set a legal precedent. It also means that AI creators need to think about having safeguards in place before the let members of the public interact with them. Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated spam has been sent to SF authors who are dead! One of the folks at the excellent SF Encyclopaedia kindly tipped Gaia off to the Encyclopaedia getting spam e-mails, but not addresses to the Encyclopaedia staff but authors who have entries in the Encyclopaedia. These messages offered dubious book promotion opportunities and some were aimed at authors who were dead! Details here, over at the Encyclopaedia. And, if you are not familiar with the Encyclopaedia, while you are there do check it out: it's a great reseource. Gaia keeps telling folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens... Meanwhile, The Bookseller (the British book trade magazine) reported in December that one Jane Austin was the attempted recipient of an AI spam bot e-mail promising -- for a fee of course -- to extend Pride and Prejudice’s reach... Flying the flags is not innocent Aditya Chakrabortty in the Guardian reminds us that the great authorJ. G. Ballard was most prescient with his novel Kingdom Come which although almost 20 years old eiriely reflects today’s Britain. In the real world of the summer of 2025, all over the country those whose suympathies may lie with the new Reform party put up tens of thousands of Engluish (George Cross) and UK (Union Jack) flags on street light poles. This, some have opined was motivated by fear/hatred of imigrants to Britain, especially those whose appearence was not native western European Ballard writes: An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he thinks, how festive.Once more, Gaia is reminded that science fiction is a powerful tool capable of holding up a mirror to sourselves. 50 years ago: It was proposed to give an official title to the species of the Loch Ness Monster! The proposal originally came in a December 1975 edition of Nature but was questioned in a January 1976 edition. The proposed name was Nessiteras rhombopteryx based on a picture of a for a rhomboidal object photographed in Loch Ness which some claimed was the monster. The push back came when Nature noted that the evidence presented for the existence of Nessiteras rhombopteryx as a new species of animal falls far short of any normal standards expected in taxonomic zoology. Which brings us neatly on to our never-changing end-of-Gaia column regular…The 2026 Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year shortlist and winner have been announced.
The shortlist for the 2026 award for 2025 works included:- And the winner… The Pornographic Delicatessen: Mid-century Montréal’s Erotic Art, Media, and Spaces . There were just two percentage points in the vote -- a narrower margin even than last year -- seperating the winner from the runner up, Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder. The Pornographic Delicatessen’s share of the public vote was 23.7%, the lowest-ever for a Diagram winner… You can check out Gaia's previous Diagram Prize news reported in earlier Gaia columns includes book titles from: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. See you in 2027 with more sciencey whimsicality and SF frivolity. [Up: Gaia Index | Concat': Home Page | Recent Site Additions] [ Year's Film & Convention Diary | One Page SF Futures Short Stories | SF Convention Reviews] |