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It might not seem like it, but the Moon is constantly being both sandblasted and baked. Its lack of a thick atmosphere allows micrometeorites to impact the surface at speed, and the solar wind isn’t held back either, baking the regolith with a constant flow of high-energy particles. These processes drive what is called “space weathering”, and it can drastically alter the physical and chemical properties of the lunar dirt over the course of billions of years. And we’re finally getting a better sense of what that means in practice thanks to two new papers from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University, which used advanced electron tomography and spectroscopic techniques to analyze samples returned from the Chang’e-5 mission to the near side of the Moon.

Ages 40 to 65 see a period of turmoil in the brain that has previously been overlooked. But identifying problems during this time can protect your cognitive health for decades to come

Our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum goes back to Isaac Newton, but astronomers are still finding new ways to employ it. Astrophysicist Emma Chapman explores how much these invisible waves can reveal to us about the cosmos – and whether they might show us that we’re not alone

We founded Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society in 1992, partially in response to a market demand from consumers and the media for a scientific and rational response to increasingly tantalizing claims of the paranormal and supernatural, ESP and Psi, telepathy and telekinesis, NDEs and OBEs, ghosts and poltergeists, astrology and psychics, cryptozoology and strange creatures, haunted houses and mysterious places, UFOs and aliens, conspiracy theories and cults, and a litany of anomalous psychological experiences people reported.

What, wondered general readers and editors at media outlets, is going on here? Joining the burgeoning skeptical movement that began in the 1970s in response to such claims (including and especially the irrepressibly entertaining psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller, debunked by James “The Amazing” Randi), we were promptly inundated with media requests for interviews with experts in these various claims and fields, and it was taken for granted by virtually everyone in what is today called (sometimes pejoratively) the Mainstream Media (MSM), that if you feature someone making an extraordinary claim you need to balance the report with someone with a prosaic explanation, presumably someone from the scientific or academic community, or those closely aligned in adjacent fields.

By the mid 1990s we had film crews in our office every week, and it was a rare day when I didn’t have a radio interview by phone or a television interview at a local station or studio. For a Fox Family Channel television series I co-hosted (with X-Files’ Mitch Pileggi) called Exploring the Unknown, we included believers in the phenomena and let them make their best case for the reality of what they claimed was true, and then we provided a skeptical perspective on what scientists and other experts thought was really going on.

When my first book was published in 1997, Why People Believe Weird Things, my publisher sent me on a book tour around the country in which each day was filled with multiple media interviews, radio and television shows, and a book signing at a local bookstore. For this and subsequent books, I was on Oprah (ABC), Donahue (ABC), Nightline (ABC), Dateline (NBC), 20/20 (ABC), Larry King Live (CNN), Charlie Rose (PBS), The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), The View (NBC), Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (ABC), Unsolved Mysteries (History Channel), along with hundreds (thousands?) of radio and print media.

Oh, to have such imbalance back! Those days are gone, along with most of those shows.

I had a few complaints along the way about imbalance. For example, Larry King Live would typically have a table full of UFO believers and me as the token skeptic, and Oprah edited out of a show my comment that the psychic for which I was there to offer a rational explanation of her apparently paranormal phenomena, had actually already done a reading the day before on the woman in the studio audience that day that made it look like she was “telepathically” receiving the information she had already gotten. I was often edited to shorten my explanation, or sometimes even to make it look like I was befuddled even though I wasn’t.

Oh, to have such imbalance back! Those days are gone, along with most of those shows. And while many of today’s MSM outlets still mouth their support of “fair and balanced” reporting, in my experience most do not practice it, at least in those areas about which I know a fair amount. On UFOs, for example, where I was a regular commentator on these mysterious sightings in the sky (or abductions in peoples’ bedrooms), today there are weekly reports, segments, and shows about UFOs (now called UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), that almost never feature any scientist or scholar to offer a prosaic explanation. 

Unidentified ≠ Aliens. Unidentified = Unknown. Full stop.

Think about that. As I’ve been reporting for years, even hardcore UFOlogists admit that at least 95 percent of all sightings have natural terrestrial explanations, such as (to quote UFO advocate Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record):

weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window.

And yet…nearly every report you will ever see on MSM, cable shows, podcasts, and social media posts completely ignore the 95 percent and focus instead on the 5 percent unexplained, which does not even mean that they’re alien spaceships or Russian or Chinese super-craft! Unidentified ≠ Aliens. Unidentified = Unknown. Full stop.

I know well the media mantra “if it bleeds it leads,” along with the “man bites dog” meme, but where are the media editors who tell their reporters “be sure to interview someone with a different perspective” or “let’s talk to someone who knows all about this topic but doesn’t believe what our main guest thinks is real”? Yes, there are still a few around, but the imbalance is glaringly obvious to anyone who pays attention.

For example, I am a member of the Galileo Project as their token skeptic, thanks to the foresight of the director Avi Loeb, the highly accomplished astronomer at Harvard University (and with whom I have a $1000 bet that we will not have disclosure of alien contact by December 31, 2030). But as Avi reports and posts about in his daily Medium blog, he has television and podcast interviews every day in his office, often several a day, whereas his equally accomplished and reputable colleagues who know as much as he knows about, say, 3I/Atlas (the interstellar object that swung through our solar system in 2025), go under the media radar when they say it is most likely a comet; whereas Avi, who admits it probably is a comet, is willing to say that it could be an alien mothership coming into our solar system, and could even release baby ships to invade Earth! Wait, what did that Harvard astronomer just say? Get the camera crew!

I don’t begrudge Avi’s newfound fame (after toiling for decades as a black-hole expert grinding out hundreds of scientific papers that almost no one reads and zero media people care about), and who wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled to discover that we are not alone in the universe, and not only that, a disclosure that these aliens know we’re here and have even visited Earth? I certainly would, and most scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the general public (according to surveys) would be equally ecstatic. But so far, we not only have no definitive evidence of alien contact, this extraordinary claim doesn’t even have ordinary evidence for it, so why does the media focus on the 5 percent and largely ignore the 95 percent?

I find it absolutely mind-blowing what has unfolded over the past two decades.

It didn’t use to be that way. It is now. Why? Because of the rapidly changing media landscape largely driven by what is called the attention economy. I have done the best I can to keep up, which is no small feat for a Baby Boomer raised and come of age in the era of Walter Cronkite and three television networks, but I find it absolutely mind-blowing what has unfolded over the past two decades. 

For example, for Scientific American I penned 214 consecutive monthly essays over the span of 18 years. For most of that time I and the magazine were inundated with reader mail for weeks after each issue, and when the internet really took off and the magazine opened up readers’ comments online, chatter there and on social media carried on for weeks after each issue. That is not what happens with published articles, essays, and opinion editorials today. Discussions about this or that commentary last, at most, a few days, but usually just a few hours or minutes, before it is bumped down the page by countless other content, which is now being generated by countless content producers.

The Conspiracy Grift

Skeptic magazine, Volume 31 Issue 2

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When my Scientific American column ended in 2019 I was recruited by the online platform Substack to relaunch it. But this time I started posting my commentaries every week instead of every month, and even that made me feel like I was a slacker compared to other content producers, independent journalists, and the like, who were cranking out material every day. And then I noticed that instead of a couple of us at Scientific American, there were hundreds of regular columnists at Substack, and given their business model of taking pennies-on-the-dollar per creator, that number has now ballooned to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 (!), drowning out any expert in a cacophony of voices.

The numbers are so staggering that, compared to my reach before all this came online, I feel completely overwhelmed as if I am just shouting into a hurricane-level wind.

And then there is podcasting. I appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular show seven times over the years, and when it was clear that this was going to become another popular means of content production for skepticism I started my own podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. I am proud of the show and love doing it, inasmuch as I speak to authors of new nonfiction books that I would be reading anyway, and here I get to have a one-on-one conversation with the author, which I never had before. But I’m a nobody compared to the tens of millions of people reached by Rogan and many other popular podcasts, and according to Spotify there are between six and seven million podcast titles in 2026 (while Apple Podcasts reports having 2.6–2.9 million shows). Even when filters are used to skim off the inactive podcasts, there are still over 400,000 active shows, together reaching around 600 million monthly or regular listeners for 2026. The numbers are so staggering that, compared to my reach before all this came online, I feel completely overwhelmed as if I am just shouting into a hurricane-level wind.

Even more overwhelming is what is primarily driving today’s media: the attention economy. Most of these content producers, companies, and organizations derive their budgets from subscribers and advertisers, which are driven by numbers of followers, which in turn are in search of something—anything—that grabs their attention. You think 3I/Atlas is a comet? Boring! You think 3I/Atlas could be an invading alien spaceship coming into our solar system to colonize Earthlings and turn us into slaves? Take my money!

And who do podcasters wish to get on their shows? Some seek out real experts, but a lot of the most popular podcasters seek out the most famous people they can get, and these days those are the people with the most followers, who might then follow the podcast, which will drive up their listenership numbers, which will generate more revenue, which … and there is our attention economy at work.

Though it's a toxic chemical, hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is also important for the development of life. It's a precursor to things like amino acids and nucleic acids and plays a central role in theories of the origin of life on Earth. Recently, difficult questions have been asked about how it could have formed on the early Earth. But the authors of new research in PNAS seemed to have figured it out.

The search for any sign of life on Mars continues. In the latest update, a new data release from Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) - essentially the rover’s portable X-ray diffraction lab - and published in a paper in Science, analyzes 20 different rock samples from various elevations of Mount Sharp, the mountain in the center of Gale Crater that Curiosity has been slowly climbing. In the paper, the researchers describe how the size of the crystals in those samples could help scientists determine where to look for evidence that life might have evolved on the Red Planet.

The most exciting popular science reads this month explore everything from symbiosis to hormones, while Alice Roberts takes on an editor-in-chief role in her latest book

From dementia to heart attacks, hearing loss has been linked to a wide range of effects across the body, and the condition is on the rise. Fortunately, we're learning how best to safeguard this crucial sense and how we might be able to reverse the damage

Computer simulations have uncovered a new manganese compound that could exist deep in Earth’s mantle and may be connected to the process that gave our atmosphere oxygen

3I/ATLAS has caused quite a stir over the last year, inviting astronomers to update what they know about other solar systems as well as our own. However, this third interstellar visitor may have an unexpected impact on our understanding of dark matter. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at the University of Hamburg, attempts to calculate the impact that the presence of large amounts of interstellar objects (ISOs) would have on our calculation of dark matter in our galaxy.

Last night on the NBC News (and also on the same station the night before) I heard a report on a new cancer drug touted as being almost miraculous. The drug was called daraxonrasib, was described as working by blocking a mutated promoter of tumor growth in people with metastatic pancreatic cancer—a notoriously fatal disease (the median survival period after diagnosis of this stage is about 3-6 months, and the five-year survival rate is 3.2%).  But the news confused survival time with survival rate, saying something like “the drug doubles the survival rate. . . .from 6 months to 13.2 months”. (I may have gotten the figures wrong as I’m working from memory.)  I knew that something was wrong, as metastatic pancreatic cancer is almost always fatal, so the survival rate, which the percentage of people still alive after a specified period of time (often five years), cannot be expressed in months. 

Sure enough, this mistake, expressing the effects as a doubling of survival rate, was not only misleading, but widespread.  It’s easy to find similar errors in the press; just google the drug name and “survival rate”:

From CBS News (click all screenshots to read):

An excerpt (all excerpts are indented). I’ve put the confusing bits in bold:

A new, experimental medication nearly doubled overall survival rates for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, according to the results of a study published Sunday.

Researchers say the findings are a significant marker of progress toward treating a notoriously deadly type of cancer, for which there have historically been limited effective options for therapies.

The drug is called daraxonrasib and it blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases — a target that had eluded treatment for decades.

“While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward,” said Dr. Zev Wainberg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the study.

The research team found that taking the medication, as a daily pill, reduced the risk of death by 60% for patients with metastatic, or spreading, pancreatic cancer who had previously received treatment. That was compared with survival rates of patients receiving standard chemotherapy, according to UCLA Health.

It randomly assigned the experimental drug or more chemotherapy to 500 patients whose metastatic cancer had quit responding to prior treatment. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Sunday at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

Those taking daraxonrasib lived for a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for chemotherapy recipients. While that may seem like a small improvement, Wainberg said it marked the first drug to show a substantial advantage over chemotherapy.

 Note that while CBS says that it reduces the risk of death by 60%, there are NO DATA showing that. The risk of death is again nearly 100%, though survival time increases by a bit more than two. Also, “survival rates” have not been doubled. There are no data on that, at least not in the article. 

From USA Today:

Excerpt:

An experimental drug nearly doubled the overall survival rates of pancreatic cancer patients, according to the results of its latest clinical trial.

The drug, daraxonrasib, targets the gene mutation behind most pancreatic cancer diagnoses.

In the phase 3, randomized trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 31, researchers found patients who received the drug lived a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for those who received chemotherapy.

They use “rate” but give “times.”

It’s easy to find similar conflations. This one, less excusable because of the venue, is from The Clinical Trial Vanguard:

They give the results correctly but characterize them as showing “death risk”:

A 60% reduction in the risk of death—HR 0.40—in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer is not a number the oncology community has seen before, in any phase 3 trial, in any line of therapy. That is the threshold RASolute 302 crossed. Revolution Medicines enrolled 500 patients, randomized them between once-daily oral daraxonrasib and investigator’s choice of standard cytotoxic chemotherapy, and watched median overall survival reach 13.2 months on the experimental arm versus 6.6 months on chemotherapy in the RAS G12 mutant population. Doubling median OS in second-line pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a disease where incremental gains have defined ambition for decades, reframes what the endpoint space for this indication even looks like.

Nope; the chance of dying within a year or two remains about the same, I’d guess.

. . . and a post from someone on Facebook (I won’t give a name), touting a “60% reduction in the risk of death”. That’s wrong: the risk of death is probably still about 100%

The BBC gets it right, however:

This is correct:

A pill has been found to almost double the survival time for advanced pancreatic cancer patients, with experts describing the trial as a game changer.

The drug, called daraxonrasib, appears to be a breakthrough in managing a disease that has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers.

It helps prevent the spread of cancer by locking onto and shutting off the mutated KRAS gene, which is in more than 90% of pancreatic tumours and spurs cancer growth.

The trial, which included 500 patients in North America, Europe, and Asia, found the average survival time for patients on chemotherapy was 6.6 months, compared with 13.2 months for patients on daraxonrasib. It also caused fewer side-effects.

One other point: if “death risk” is meant to say “death risk over the course of the study,” then that might be accurate. But then the journalists must clarify it.

There are two points to be made, and they’re obvious. First, more than a few science/medicine journalists, including some writing on medical websites, don’t understand statistics, mistaking “rate” for “time”.  I asked a science-friendly doctor if this mistake is common, and he replied, “All the time. Sometimes, I’m not sure it’s an unintentional mistake.”

Which leads us to the second point: this kind of conflation could provide false hope for cancer patients and their families. Knowing that you will live, on average, 6½ months longer if you take the new drug is a very different thing from knowing that you will still die with near certainty. It’s easy for one to think—and this is what I thought when I heard the teaser on television—that the drug will reduce the chance of dying by half.  Seriously, journalists, please brush up on your statistics, for this one is not rocket science!

An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life - and why we’ve overlooked its power until now - makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchet

Astronomers have finally cracked the mystery behind a strange class of repeating cosmic signals that has baffled scientists for years. Using Australia’s ASKAP radio telescope, researchers traced the bursts to a rare stellar duo in which a dense white dwarf is relentlessly siphoning material from a nearby red dwarf companion. As the stolen matter spirals inward, the system unleashes powerful radio waves and X-rays every 1.4 hours.

The real story behind the CIA spending $20 million on PROJECT STARGATE to study psychics.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

States default to a private organization run by acupuncturists and TCM practitioners to vet continuing education courses, with predictable results.

The post Acupuncture for Heart Attacks and more State-Sanctioned Pseudoscience first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A breakthrough hydrogen-production method could make clean fuel far cheaper and easier to generate. Researchers at the University of Birmingham developed a perovskite-based catalyst that splits water into hydrogen at much lower temperatures than existing technologies, potentially allowing factories, steel plants, cement works, and renewable energy sites to turn waste heat into valuable hydrogen.

Scientists have created a tiny chip that can generate, steer, and read light-based information all in one device, marking a major leap toward ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing. The breakthrough uses atomically thin materials and nanoscale structures to control a unique quantum property of light called the “valley” degree of freedom, allowing information to be encoded in new ways.

Scientists have created a tiny chip that can generate, steer, and read light-based information all in one device, marking a major leap toward ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing. The breakthrough uses atomically thin materials and nanoscale structures to control a unique quantum property of light called the “valley” degree of freedom, allowing information to be encoded in new ways.

The dwarf planet Ceres has a surface that seems to get more perplexing with each new study. A recent paper presented at EGU26 in Vienna only adds to its mystery.

The JWST found an abundance of overmassive black holes at high redshifts, pushing the limits of black hole (BH) science in the early Universe. Results have claimed that these BHs are significantly more massive than expected from the BH mass-host galaxy stellar mass relation derived from the local Universe. But new research shows they were just outliers in the normal range of masses that don't require any special causes.