April Fools papers

[LifeIsStrange]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22800
While usually humoristic, april fools papers can sometimes talk about significant discoveries that might seem too unorthodox to consider usually.
Is this new axis of evil pattern paper purely a joke or sound? (based on Gaia data)
The disclaimer mentions a systematic but it is unclear how significant.

Same question for
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22839

[mikehelland]

Purely jokes, I think.

---

Keywords: Solar system (1528), Open star clusters (1160), Cosmology (343), Gaia (2360), Cosmological principal, April Fool (4.1)

6. Disclaimer
   It is important to clarify that the apparent elongation of
   open clusters observed in this study does not necessarily cor-
   respond to true physical elongation. Instead, this effect arises
   primarily from the inherent uncertainties in parallax measure-
   ments, which are generally larger than those in right ascension
   and declination. As a result, the calculated elongation may
   be exaggerated along the line of sight, giving the illusion of
   an elongated structure. We strongly suggest that researchers
   claiming to discover elongation effects along the line of sight
   in three-dimensional structures of open clusters carefully con-
   sider the impact of measurement uncertainties.

---

It says April Fool (4.1) right there.

The second one also has 4/1 (American date format) in the abstract:

Our findings convincingly indicate that the universe indeed favors odd numbers, with results achieving a significance level well above the 4.1 − 𝜎 threshold.