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A "living glue" used by barnacles to attach to underwater surfaces could also seal gut wounds caused by inflammatory bowel disease

Last week a child of one of my cohosts on the SGU, who is in fifth grade (the child, not the cohost), came home from school and declared, rather dramatically, “Mom, Dad – did you know that we never went to the Moon? It was all fake.” They found this to be a surprising revelation, but was convinced this was a proven scientific fact. Of course, we live in the age of the internet, and our children are going to be exposed to all sorts of information that may be misleading or age-inappropriate. This is one more thing parents have to deal with. What was disturbing about this incident was where they learned this “scientific fact” – from their science teacher.

Any parent should be concerned about this, but in a family of skeptical science communicators, this raised the alarm bells. But the first thing they did was send a polite e-mail to the teacher (cc’ing the principal) and simply ask what happened. This is good practice – always go to the primary source. It’s easy for anyone to get the wrong idea, and this wouldn’t be the first time a fifth grader misinterpreted a lesson in class. The teacher essentially said that while he did not explicitly tell the students we did not go to the Moon (the student reports he said “it’s possible we did not go to the Moon”), he personally believes we did not, and that it is a “proven scientific fact” that it would have been impossible, then and now, to send people to the Moon (somebody should tell the Artemis astronauts).

Apparently he raised at least two points in class – that there were (impossibly) no stars in the background of the photographs taken from the Moon, and the astronauts could not have survived passage through the radiation belts around the Earth. These are both old and long-debunked claims of the Moon-hoax conspiracy theorists. While it is easy to find sources online, let me briefly summarize why these claims are wrong.

The first claim, about no stars in the photographs from the Moon, is trivially solved with some basic photography knowledge. Cameras have to be set for different light levels. There are three basic setting – the ISO of the film or sensor (a measure of how sensitive it is to light), the aperture and the shutter speed. The sky on the Moon is black because there is no atmosphere to diffuse the light, but the surface during the day can still be very bright, and reflect off every surface. This means, to avoid over exposure, they would have used a small aperture and fast shutter speed, which would not have allowed for exposing the tiny amount of light coming from stars, which are only a point of light. Even from Earth, if you want to get a visible picture of stars at night you need to take a long exposure – long enough that you need to use a tripod. Regular cameras (including the ones used during Apollo) have a low dynamic range – the range of light levels they can capture simultaneously. So they would not have been able to capture the bright lunar surface and stars in the background at the same time. Modern digital cameras have techniques for capturing high dynamic range, but this does not apply to the Apollo-era cameras.

The second point refers to the Van Allen belts, which are belts of increased radiation intensity around the Earth. These are tori of ionic radiation trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field. They can vary in shape and intensity, and are not symmetrical. The inner belt is mainly protons and the outer belt is mainly electrons. They do pose an issue for satellites, which have to have proper shielding to protect any sensitive electronics. Crucially – we knew about the Van Allen belts since 1958, so NASA had this information when planning the Apollo missions.

This is a bit more complicated to debunk than the silly photography claim, but still, this information is widely publicly available. The effects of radiation exposure are determined by three variables – the intensity of the radiation, the type and energy of the particles, and the time of exposure. The Apollo capsules were specifically shielded with an aluminum alloy hull and insulation to reduce the intensity of the radiation. Also, NASA specifically calculated a launch trajectory to minimize the time they would spend traversing the Van Allen belts. They ended up spending just a few minutes in the higher energy lower belt, and about 90 minutes in the outer belt. The total radiation exposure was the equivalent of a typical CT scan – so not much. Because there are so few astronauts it is difficult to get statistically powerful data on their subsequent risk of death from cancer or cardiovascular disease, but what evidence we have shows no significant increase in risk.

So these two points, which this science teacher apparently believes “proves” it is impossible to send humans to the Moon, are easily debunked with some basic science knowledge. This gets me to the real point of this post – anyone who believes such a conspiracy is likely not qualified to teach science. I firmly believe that science teachers, even at the fifth grade level, need to have a working basic knowledge of science and critical thinking. Believing a conspiracy theory like this is evidence for lack of both. In addition to these points, we can ask – what would have to be true in order for the Moon hoax conspiracy to be true. The size of the conspiracy would have to be massive? Why didn’t the Soviet Union call us out on the hoax, which they could easily have detected and demonstrated? How has it been maintained for six decades? Why hasn’t the scientific community called NASA out on the hoax? If it were truly impossible to go to the Moon, there are generations of scientists, from all over the world, who could easily demonstrate this.

The lack of curiosity and critical thinking on display here is shocking and profound. What a horrible lesson to teach a class of fifth-graders. This also raises another point – expressing such beliefs to fifth graders (apparently without any proper context) shows an incredible lack of judgement. This was not part of any lesson plan or approved material, and he has to know it is (to say the least) controversial (bat-shit crazy is more like it). Even if it were presented in a “teach the controversy” format to encourage critical thinking, I would question whether this is age-appropriate.

Of course, we will turn this into a teaching moment, and use it as an opportunity to teach critical thinking, why grand conspiracy theories are suspect, and some of the relevant science. We will also do what we can to make sure the entire class gets this lesson. We also will try to drive home that teaching such nonsense as “proven scientific fact” to school children is, to say the least, not appropriate.

 

The post Moon Landing Hoax In School first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Today we have a photo-and-text submission from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior on fly migration. It’s a subject dear to my heart as I used to work on it, publishing three papers on migration in Drosophila.  Athayde’s subject, though, is hoverflies, not fruit flies. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note: I changed Athayde’s words “hover flies” to the more common usage “hoverflies,” but Athayde notes that most entomologists use the two-word rather than one-word description.

On the road again, goin’ places that I’ve never been

Sometime between 1400 and 1200 BC, Yahweh (aka God) decided it was time to nudge the Egyptians to let their captive Israelites go. Yahweh could have tried diplomacy, but in his infinite wisdom he concluded that “The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD”. And there was no better way to let the Pharaoh and his people know who the bigwig was around there than by punishing them with a series of plagues. Of the ten celestial disasters inflicted upon the Egyptians, two involved mosquitoes (or midges) and flies, which probably were also the agents behind another two plagues manifested as infectious diseases of people and livestock. Yahweh understood very well the efficacy of some flies (order Diptera) and pathogens to wreck revenge – after all, he created them.

Fig 1. The Third Plague of Egypt, by William de Brailes, circa 1250. Aaron strikes his rod on the ground, transforming dust into gnats (kinnim in Hebrew). In the King James version of the Bible, lice are the culprits, but today most scholars accept that kinnim should be translated as ‘gnats’ or ‘mosquitoes’ © Jan Luyken, 1712, Wikimedia Commons:

The tales of pestilent flies depicted in the book of Exodus could have been inspired by real events, as pest infestations and epidemics were recurrent in the ancient world. Fly outbreaks are facilitated by these insects’ capability to disperse for long distances and arrive at new locations suddenly and in massive numbers. There are no better examples of these efficient colonisers than hoverflies or syrphid flies (family Syrphidae) such as the marmalade (Episyrphus balteatus) and the migrant (Eupeodes corollae) hoverflies. Each autumn, they leave Britain and head south to spend the winter in southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Their offspring move northwards in the spring, lay eggs, and the new generation sets out on the cycle again. Researchers have estimated that up to four billion marmalade and migrant hoverflies cross the English Channel to and from Great Britain every year. This represents 80 tons of biomass. If you are impressed by these figures, you should know that hoverflies account for a fraction of insects’ latitudinal migrations known as ‘bioflows’: about 3.5 trillion insects, or 3200 tons of biomass, migrate into southern Britain annually (Wotton et al., 2019). Insect bioflows pour vast amounts of nutrients (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus) and countless prey, predators, parasites and herbivores into ecosystems, but we have only a vague understanding of their impact on food webs and local species.

Fig 2. A female marmalade hoverfly, a long distance frequent flier © Guido Gerding, Wikimedia Commons:

These hardy wanderers have another particularity of significant ecological importance: they transport pollen grains.

Most flies have no pollen-collecting structures and have few ‘hairs’ (setae), which are important pollen gatherers. These are negative marks for candidates to the pollinators’ club, but some flies compensate their shortcomings by their massive numbers. Each marmalade and migrant hoverfly carries an average of 10 pollen grains from up to three plant species on their journey into Britain. That’s paltry compared to a bee, but altogether, those flies bring in 3 to 8 billion pollen grains on each inward journey.

Pollen importation via flies is a recurrent phenomenon. In Cyprus, warm temperatures and favourable winds bring millions of insect migrants from the Middle East region, more than 100 km to the east. Flies make up nearly 90% of these bioflows, and many of them are loaded with pollen (Hawkes et al., 2022).

Fig 3. A common drone fly (Eristalis tenax) (A) and a blowfly (Calliphora sp.) (B) with orchid pollinia attached to their heads after a > 100-km sea crossing to Cyprus © Hawkes et al., 2022:

Pollen-loaded flies can turn up anywhere the wind takes them, even to specks of dry ground in the middle of nowhere. Over a two-month period, 121 marmaladehover flies reached a North Sea oil rig approximately 200 km from Aberdeen, UK. Over 90% of these flies had pollen attached to them, sometimes from eight plant species. Based on pollen barcoding and wind trajectory modelling, it was estimated that these flies traversed from 265 to 500 km of open water in a single journey, probably from the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark (Doyle et al., 2025).

Fig 4. (a) Location of an oil rig visited by hoverflies (b), and its aerial view © Doyle et al., 2025:

Flies’ long-distance pollen transfers may help connect isolated plant populations, such as in fragmented habitats, but we don’t know much about the ecological implications. However we do know that their contribution can be important. In continental Europe, wild carrot (Daucus carota) depends on a range of insects for pollinators, especially bees. But bees are absent from La Foradada, a 1,6 ha Mediterranean islet about 50 km off the Spanish coast. In this solitary spot of land, D. carota subsp. commutatus relies on the accidental arrival of common drone flies for its pollination (Pérez-Bañón et al., 2007).

Fi 5. La Foradada, devoid of bees and humans, is visited by pollinating drone flies © JavierValencia2005  Wikimedia Commons:

Butterflies, bumble bees, moths and dragonflies are known travellers, but we know much less about migrant flies, which may have significant roles in pollination ecology. We just have to pay more attention to these unpretentious pilgrims.

References

Doyle, T.D. et al. 2025. Long-range pollen transport across the North Sea: Insights from migratory hoverflies landing on a remote oil rig. Journal of Animal Ecology 94: 2267–2281.
Hawkes, W.S.L. et al. 2022. Huge spring migrations of insects from the Middle East to Europe: quantifying the migratory assemblage and ecosystem services. Ecography e06288.
Pérez-Bañón, C. et al., 2007. Pollination in small islands by occasional visitors: The case of Daucus carota subsp. commutatus (Apiaceae) in the Columbretes archipelago, Spain. Plant Ecology 192: 133-151.
Wotton, K.R. et al. 2019. Mass seasonal migrations of hoverflies provide extensive pollination and crop protection services. Current Biology 29: 2167–2173.

As tensions over Greenland rise, some Europeans are asking whether it is time to disentangle themselves from US tech dominance – but from smartphones to cloud services, rejecting US tech is easier said than done

It is theoretically possible for a particularly massive star to collapse in on itself to form a black hole rather than exploding in a supernova, and we might now have seen the process in action

The early stage of giant telescope development involves a lot of horse-trading to try to appease all the different stakeholders that are hoping to get what they want out of the project, but also to try to appease the financial managers that want to minimize its cost. Typically this horse-trading takes the form of a series of white papers that describe what would be needed to meet the stated objectives of the mission and suggest the type of instrumentation and systems that would be needed to achieve them. One such white paper was recently released by the Living Worlds Working Group, which is tasked with speccing out the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), one of the world’s premiere exoplanet hunting telescopes that is currently in the early development stage. Their argument in the paper, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, in order to meet the objectives laid out in the recent Decadal survey that called for the telescope, it must have extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, but also be able to capture a very wide spectrum of light.

In the 13.8 billion years that our universe has been around, some moments stand out over others – for the most exciting and impactful one, we have to go back to the very beginning, says cosmology columnist Leah Crane

Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and densifying their cores in surprising ways. Until now, this crucial middle ground of behavior was nearly impossible to model accurately. The new code makes these simulations faster, more precise, and accessible enough to run on a laptop.

Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and densifying their cores in surprising ways. Until now, this crucial middle ground of behavior was nearly impossible to model accurately. The new code makes these simulations faster, more precise, and accessible enough to run on a laptop.

Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and densifying their cores in surprising ways. Until now, this crucial middle ground of behavior was nearly impossible to model accurately. The new code makes these simulations faster, more precise, and accessible enough to run on a laptop.

As global energy demand surges—driven by AI-hungry data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrified transportation—researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have unveiled a breakthrough that could help squeeze far more power from existing electricity supplies. Their new silicon-carbide-based power module, called ULIS, packs dramatically more power into a smaller, lighter, and cheaper design while wasting far less energy in the process.

The protein that protects tardigrade DNA from radiation and mutagenic chemicals was thought to be harmless, but can in fact have major downsides

Inside the cores of ice giant planets, the pressure and temperature are so extreme that the water residing there transitions into a phase completely unfamiliar under the normal conditions of Earth. Known as “superionic water”, this form of water is a type of ice. However, unlike regular ice it’s actually hot, and also black. For decades, scientists thought that the superionic water in the core of Neptune and Uranus is responsible for the wild, unaligned magnetic fields that the Voyager 2 spacecraft saw when passing them. A series of experiments described in a paper published in Nature Communications by Leon Andriambariarijaona and his co-authors at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Sorbonne provides experimental evidence of why exactly the ice causes these weird magnetic fields - because it is far messier than anyone expected.

Eruptions from volcanic arcs, found where tectonic plates converge, are one of the major drivers of natural carbon emissions, but a model of Earth’s ancient carbon cycle suggests this is a relatively recent phenomenon

As 2026 dawns, look for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ramp up his assault on vaccines using policy-based evidence making and altering Vaccine Court standards.

The post RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines (part 6): Liability, ethics, and policy-based evidence making first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Solid-state batteries could store more energy and charge faster than today’s batteries, but they tend to crack and fail over time. Stanford researchers found that a nanoscale silver treatment can greatly strengthen the battery’s ceramic core. The silver helps seal tiny flaws and prevents lithium from causing further damage. This simple approach could help unlock next-generation batteries.

Here we have an 83-minute interview of Matthew Crick by Michael Shermer; the topic is Francis Crick as described in Matthew’s new book Crick: A Mind in Motion. Talking to a friend last night, I realized that the two best biographies of scientists I’ve read are Matthew’s book and Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume biography of Darwin (the two-book set is a must-read, and I recommend both, though Princeton will issue in June a one-volume condensation).

At any rate, if you want to get an 83-minute summary of Matthew’s book, or see if you want to read the book, as you should, have a listen to Matthew’s exposition at the link below.  I have recommended his and Browne’s books because they’re not only comprehensive, but eminently readable, and you can get a sense of Matthew’s eloquence by his off-the-cuff discussion with Shermer.

Click below to listen.

I’ve put the cover below because Shermer mentions it at the outset of the discussion:

A huge bar of iron has been discovered lurking inside the iconic Ring Nebula. The structure is enormous, spanning hundreds of times the size of Pluto’s orbit and containing a Mars-sized amount of iron. It was detected using a new instrument that allowed astronomers to map the nebula in far greater detail than ever before. The origin of the iron bar is still a mystery, with one theory suggesting it could be the remains of a vaporized planet.

When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. Genetic changes emerged that altered how viruses attach to bacteria and how bacteria defend themselves. The findings could help improve phage therapies against drug-resistant infections.

I now have two sets of photos after this one, but I’m still nervous. If you have good wildlife photos, please sent them in. Thanks!

It’s been a cold week in Chicago (right now it’s 9°F or -13°C), and it’s going to be cold this coming week as well. I hope the turtles at the bottom of Botany Pond are okay. But given the weather it’s appropriate that today we have photographs of Antarctica from reader Paul Turpin.  Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

My brother Mark recently returned from a cruise to the Antarctic on the Scenic Eclipse. I told him you loved penguins and he gave me permission to send you these photos.  I believe these are all gentoo penguins [Pygoscelis papua] except for one which included a chinstrap friend [Pygoscelis antarcticus].  The open water photo is when they were at the Antarctic Circle.