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Your hands are heavier than you think. Beer goggles aren’t real. And many water utilities in the United Kingdom still use dowsing to find leaks in pipes.

It’s the first part of our annual best-in-show of science stories from the year, with a roundup of some of the funniest and most futuristic-feeling headlines from 2023. Like the Euclid Space Telescope’s successful start to a mission that will map the sky and offer new insights into dark matter and the very structure of the universe. And a half-synthetic yeast that might feel (half) at home in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Or how generative AI has gone so far as to flood the submissions of the magazine Clarkesworld with too many badly written science fiction stories.

Plus, why a handful of doctors swallowed the heads of LEGO toys.

Hosts Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor discuss all of this and more with guests Clare Wilson, Sam Wong and Leah Crane. To read more about these stories, visit newscientist.com.

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Best of 2023, part 1: Euclid telescope’s big year; AI is everywhere (for better and worse); why doctors searched their poo for tiny toys

The world, the universe and us