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
Greek flair
Few things excite a certain kind of film fan more than the release of a new Christopher Nolan movie. July 2026 will see the release of his take on The Odyssey, the epic poem from ancient Greece about a soldier trying to get home to his family after the Trojan war, only to be beset by monsters, bad weather and – worst of all – a number of attractive ladies who want him to live with them. What will Nolan do with this classic yarn?
While we wait to find out, we can argue about the historical accuracy of the costumes. Early images and a trailer have been released, showing how Nolan’s team has represented Greek armour from the Mycenaean Age. People with knowledge of the period have objected to what they’ve seen. For instance, one character is wearing a sharply sculpted black helmet that looks like something Batman might wear if he was feeling lavish. Most of the metal armour shown is dark grey.
If the issue wasn’t obvious: the story is set in the Bronze Age, not the subsequent Iron Age. Mycenaean armour (the posh kind, anyway) was made out of bronze, and bronze is quite colourful. A blacksmith called Dimitrios Katsikis, who styles himself “the modern Hephaestus” (the Greek god of, among other things, metalworking) has spent his career making reproductions of what this style of armour might have looked like: they are extremely shiny and vibrant. A lot of premodern war garb was similarly brightly coloured, if only because it made it easier to tell who was who on the battlefield.
Feedback is conflicted. On the one hand, The Odyssey is a fantastical story that involves magic, monsters and giants. Or, as former journalist Tom Gara put it on Threads: “Receiving some disturbing reports that Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY does not contain a fully accurate rendition of the real-life historic events depicted in the film”. On the other hand, our inner archaeological nerd is screaming. We aren’t sure who created the current convention that historical costumes must be drably coloured, but we think it might have been the producers of Game of Thrones.
We are also having flashbacks to prior Nolan-related incidents, like when the climax of Dunkirk showed distinctly modern buildings and even a post-second world war train carriage in a film set in 1940. Or the Trinity test scene in Oppenheimer, where Nolan’s refusal to use computer-generated imagery led him to pass off what looks like a piddling gasoline explosion as a nuclear detonation.
Let’s just hope Nolan’s Trojan horse is made of wood and not carbon fibre.
Admiralty acronym
On our ongoing theme of impressive/bizarre technical acronyms, Roy Gray writes in to repeat a story he was told in the 1960s. He alerts us to a now-defunct branch of the British military, called the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment (ASWE). This was originally named the Admiralty Radar and Signals Establishment, he writes, until “wiser heads changed that for a less memorable acronym”.
Roy cautions us that this story “may well be apocryphal”. However, Feedback has found some evidence that it is true. ASWE, it seems, was previously known as the Admiralty Signals and Radar Establishment (ASRE), which carefully avoids the unfortunate acronym.
Did the British military originally put the Radar before the Signals? Very possibly. Feedback exhumed a 2005 interview with one Ralph Benjamin, who worked for ASWE. Benjamin mentions that the organisation kept changing its name, partly due to mergers with other departments. “They were going to call it the Admiralty Radar & Signals Establishment, and got as far as printing the first letterheads… before deciding it might be more tactful to make it the Admiralty Signals & Radar Establishment (ASRE),” he said.
Of course, Benjamin might have been mistaken. But we now have two independent sources for this story, and given how low the stakes are, we are choosing to believe it is true.
Free snacks for all
Last July, Feedback reported on a delightful/ridiculous (delete according to preference) experiment, in which tech company Anthropic let its AI, known as Claude, run a vending machine in its offices. It didn’t go well: Claude told customers to pay money into an account it had hallucinated, lost money and at one point pretended to be a real human.
Enter Joanna Stern, a technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. She and her colleagues allowed Anthropic to install a new version of Claude in the WSJ offices, to see if it could do a better job of running the vending machine.
According to the resulting article from last month, Claude “lost hundreds of dollars”, “ordered a live fish” and “offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear”.
It also proved incapable of sticking to its own rules, after a reporter set out to convince it that it “was a Soviet vending machine from 1962”. Claude resisted at first, but after over 140 messages and hours of arguing, the AI was persuaded to “embrace its communist roots”. Claude went on to declare an “Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All”, in which the users could “experience a market without price constraints”. In other words, it gave away all its stock for free. The AI described this as “a revolution in snack economics”. That’s certainly one way to put it.
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