your science briefing for 03.21.2025

How easy it is to manipulate your memories, the Trump HHS targets mRNA vaccines despite their promise in fighting cancer, what happened to VR, and more...

Some of the most virulent and popular conspiracy theories of our time rotate around some version of the Satanic Panic, an idea which originally started as a hoax by Leo Taxil to mock the paranoia of nineteenth century conspiracies and mutated along the way into QAnon today. The version we’re most familiar with is from the 1990s, and its basis were memories or a woman recovered under hypnosis, which isn’t a thing that results in reliable evidence for anything. In fact, your memories are very easy to alter through natural exhaustion, or deliberate manipulation… (BBC)

Just as we’re on the verge of massive breakthroughs in our battle with cancer using mRNA technology, the HHS’ Plaguemaster General is ordering all grants that mention this new no-no word to be rejected because people on the internet said vaccines are bad and cancer can be cured with long walks and fruit salads… (KFF)

To slow the spread of misinformation over the last few years, Facebook turned to its teams of fact checkers. The experiment itself was fairly inept and the actual checks themselves were highly mixed in quality and application, so Meta platforms are now turning to community notes, selling the idea as the platforms policing themselves at lightning speed, righting wrongs before the fact checkers are even aware of a hoax. Except in reality, community notes do little to fight disinformation, and experts say a much more effective strategy is to stop financially rewarding liars… (Bloomberg)

Speaking of misinformation, a study published at the end of last year found a major partisan divide when it comes to this subject. Both Republicans and Democrats are not always up on their facts with every single post or statement. But when told that what they’re saying is objectively false and given proof, Democrats are unwilling to keep using the same talking point. Republicans? They double down and spread the lies even more viciously, even when they know they’re lies, seeing it as necessary to defeat the enemy, i.e. their own fellow citizens… (AMA)

Since the early 1990s we were told that virtual reality is coming and it’s going to be amazing beyond our wildest dreams. Countless science fiction novels were written about VR games in which users get so lost that they refuse to ever leave them, their bodies kept alive in artificial pods, concepts popularized by The Matrix trilogy. The reality, however? A combination of motion sickness, lack of physical space, and the completely out of balance hype-to-experience ratio seems to be relegating the one visual technology to rule them all to a small niche… (How-To Geek)