This week I saw on various websites all kinds of science-related "best of 2025" articles. Many of them repeat some of the groundless achievement legends spread around during the year 2025. As a corrective, I offer the list below of the 12 Biggest "Overblown Hype" Science News Stories of 2025. Each was a story about someone making big boasts about grand and glorious things that were not really done.
#12: The Bennu "Building Blocks of Life" Story
NASA's Osiris-REx mission was one that gathered samples of soil and rock from the asteroid Bennu, and returned them to Earth. In 2025 many a news story announced that "building blocks of life" had been found on the asteroid Bennu. It was amazing that not one of the very many mainstream news accounts telling this story bothered to address the crucial question of how much of these "building blocks of life" were reported. It was like the publication of 100 news stories reporting that people had died in an accident in Peru, with none of them reporting how many people died. The reported levels of these "building blocks of life" was miniscule -- roughly a few parts in a billion. The levels were so small that they were probably due to earthly contamination, either in "clean rooms" analyzing the returned samples, or from a spacecraft which left Earth with such miniscule levels of the reported chemicals. We can have no confidence that anything was learned about the asteroid Bennu having such "building blocks of life" such as amino amino acids. A December 2025 LiveScience article tells us this:
"Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes....persist in these punishing environments."
If entire microbes can exist in such cleanrooms used to prepare spacecraft for biology-related missions and used to analyze samples returned by such spacecraft, how much more likely it is that amino acids much tinier than microbes would exist in such cleanrooms?
#11: The "Observation of Dark Matter" Story
In late 2025 a paper authored by Tomonori Totani. was announced with a press release using this language:
"Scientists have searched for dark matter for decades. One thinks he may have caught a glimpse."
As I discuss in my post here, the boast does not hold up well to scrutiny. The paper was based on an analysis of Fermi data on gamma rays coming from the center of the galaxy. An article published after my post is entitled "Did we just see dark matter? Scientists express skepticism." We read this:
"We spoke to Case Western Reserve University astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh, an expert in galaxy dynamics and dark matter, who noted that we’ve been here before.
That is, the Fermi data used in the study has already been extensively studied, and a similar excess of gamma rays was identified as early as 2009. Over the past 16 years, numerous studies have failed to find strong evidence that this signal connects to dark matter. As McGaugh succinctly put it: 'It turned out to be wrong then, [and] I expect it is wrong now.' "
Referring to another scientist commenting on Totani's paper, we read this: "And for McGaugh, the methodology in this case doesn’t stand up to scrutiny."
#10: The "Fossil Rewriting Human Origins" Story
In 2025 there was a Science Daily article grandly announcing that a fossil discovery had rewritten the story of human origins. The article had an image of a full human-like skull. But the image was fake. It was a Shutterstock image made by a graphics artist, not a photo of an actual fossil. The only fossils found were some fossils of teeth, which told us nothing very reliable or important about human origins. I discuss the affair in my post here.
#9: The "Step Towards Solving Central Mystery of Life on Earth" Story
In the year 2025 we had an article in the Harvard Gazette trying to persuade us that some great advance had been made in understanding the origin of life. We had a headline "A Step Towards Solving Central Mystery of Life on Earth." We have a subtitle of "Experiment with synthetic self-assembling materials suggests how it all might have begun." The boasts were groundless, as I discuss in my post here. All that was being discussed was the production of information-empty bubbles, with no appreciable organization. Even the simplest living thing, to the contrary, is a state of extremely high organization and very great information richness, requiring (among other things) the very special arrangement of very many thousands of amino acid parts, and the origination of hundreds of types of complex innovations (particular types of protein molecules).
#8: The "Recreation of the Dance That Sparked Complex Life" Story
In early 2025 we had in Quanta magazine an article entitled "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life." Here are the two misleading tricks involved in that title:
(1) The title is referring to the origin of eukaryotic cells, and refers to such an origin as the beginning of complex life. Such a reference is extremely misleading, as the cells believed to have preceded eukaryotic cells (prokaryotic cells) were themselves enormously complex and organized.
(2) The title makes the groundless triumphal boast that something was done to recreate the origin of eukaryotic cells. Nothing of the sort occurred.
The "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life" article refers us to a paper that was not an experiment simulating natural conditions. Instead, what went on was that scientists used high-tech equipment to inject bacteria into fungi. It is misleading to be claiming that this directed high-tech intervention was something recreating a natural event. And it is particularly misleading to try to claim that such high-tech tinkering sheds any light on the origin of eukaryotic cells, partially because fungi are themselves eukaryotic cells.
#7: The Caltech SPHEREx Press Release
In March 2025 the California Institute of Technology issued a full-of-falsehoods and full-of-nonsense press release announcing the launch of a SPHEREx scientific satellite. In my post here I analyze all of the very bad examples of false statements, ridiculous predictions and groundless boasts in the press release. The SPHEREx satellite was launched in March, 2025. None of the grand predictions of the CalTech press release have been fulfilled. For example, the press release grandly predicted, "Among several big questions the [SPHEREx] mission is poised to answer is how our universe came to be.” No such thing has happened.
#6: The "Epigenetic Switch to Turn Memories On and Off" Story
In 2025 scientists grandly announced that they had created an "epigenetic switch to turn memories on and off." The claim is debunked in my post here. The claim was based on the usual "mouse farce" of Questionable Research Practices, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes and the use of an unreliable technique for trying to measure fear or recall in rodents, the worthless method of trying to judge "freezing behavior."
#5: The "Mind Captioning" Story
In 2025 scientists grandly announced that they had created something they called "mind captioning" after analyzing brain scans of six subject who were brain scanned for 17 hours. The claims are debunked in the second half of my post here. A study of this type requires at least 15 or 20 subjects to be considered decent evidence, but in this case the study group was a way-too-small study group size of only six.
#4: The "Memories Linked in Time by Dendritic Spines" Story
In 2025 Ohio State University released a press release that had the fictional title "Dendritic spines: The key to understanding how memories are linked in time." For reasons I discuss in my post here, everything the press release states in the quote below is flight-of-fancy stuff without any solid basis in fact:
"The study shows that memories are stored in dendritic compartments: When one memory forms, the affected dendrites are primed to capture new information arriving within the next few hours, linking memories formed close in time.
'If you think of a neuron as a computer, dendrites are like tiny computers inside it, each performing its own calculations,' said lead author Megha Sehgal, assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University."
The press release was promoting the paper "Compartmentalized dendritic plasticity in the mouse retrosplenial cortex links contextual memories formed close in time" which you can read here. It is another comedy-of-errors rodent study so badly designed that we should call it a mouse farce. The study hinges upon the totally unreliable "freezing behavior" technique of trying to measure fear recall in rodents. That method is unreliable, for reasons I discuss at length in my post here. The study group size used was the way-too-small study group size of only 10 mice per study group.
Dendritic spines are about the smallest structures that humans can view in the brain. The microscopic examination of such spines gives not the slightest support for any claims that such spines have any relation to memory or thinking. Dendritic spines look no more like elements of a computing system or a memory storage system than do the little bumps on the skin of a teenager with a bad case of acne. And like acne pimples, dendritic spines have short average lifetimes of only weeks and months, excluding them as being part of any explanation for human memories that can reliably last for decades.
#3: The "Spaceship Looking Like a Comet" Story
The comet 3I/ATLAS approached the sun in 2025. Much of the year we saw the science news sites breathlessly repeating suggestions by astronomer Avi Loeb that the object was an extraterrestrial spaceship. Loeb's claims are discussed in my post here. Loeb's claims were based on avidly searching for anything in 3I/ATLAS that could be called an anomaly, and trying to kind of insinuate that "anomalous" implies "designed." It does not. There are a billion-and-one things in nature that are anomalous but not designed. By the year's end it was clear to most scientists that 3I/ATLAS was a comet, not a spaceship. Below is 3I/ATLAS as viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope on August 6, 2025.
Credit: NASA/James Webb Space Telescope
#2: The "Neuroscientific Model of Near-Death Experiences" Story
The press gave widespread coverage to the claim by researcher Charlotte Martial to have come up with a "neuroscientific model" of near-death experiences. Martial's paper is debunked in my long post you can read here. After the publication of this post on 7/15/2025 there was published (in October 2025) a scientific paper criticizing the Martial paper: the paper "A Neuroscientific Model of Near-Death Experiences Reconsidered" by Bruce Greyson and Marieta Pehlivanova, which you can read here. The Greyson and Pehlivanova paper mostly consists of criticisms different from those I made, which is an indication of how many are the criticisms that can be made of the Martial paper and its "NEPTUNE" model. The article here summarizes the Greyson paper.
At the center of Martial's explanation attempt was an appeal to the possibility of a surge of chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, glutamate and endorphins, at the time of death, with the insinuation that such chemicals may cause hallucinations. There is no robust evidence that such chemicals surge in humans near the time of death, and such chemicals do not produce hallucinations. The paper here involved experiments that increased by very many times (between 100 times and 1000 times, in other words 10000% to 100000%) the serotonin levels in volunteers, by infusions of serotonin. No hallucinations were reported. The paper "Effects of Dopamine in Man" reports on the effects of 13 subjects who were given a 1% infusion of dopamine, causing dopamine levels many times higher than naturally occur. The paper makes no mention of any hallucinatory effects or any mental effects. A similar experimental result (reporting no hallucinations) is reported in the paper here, which tested artificially produced dopamine spikes as high as 1000 times higher than normal. Martial ignored the fundamental fact that near-death experiences are often reported in those undergoing cardiac arrest, at a time when brain waves flatline. An electrically inactive brain cannot hallucinate.
#1: The "Biosignatures on Mars" Story
The story of this false alarm and the hype involving it is told in my July 2024 post "NASA's Groundless Boast About Finding a Potential Biosignature." and my September 2025 post "No, NASA Did Not Find Any Evidence of Life on Mars." NASA claimed to have "found intriguing minerals on the western edge of Jezero Crater, in the clay-rich, mudstone rocks of a valley called 'Neretva Vallis." There was nothing very special found at all. All that was found was something a little funny-looking, something that could have been formed by life, but also could have formed by lifeless geological processes.
In 2024 NASA tried to get people thinking that something of biological relevance had been found. But the story "did not stick," attracting little attention. Then in September 2025 NASA tried the "big press conference" approach. Scientists did a press conference, and the chief of NASA said "this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.” The "could be" part was ignored, and soon the press was filled with stories having misleading clickbait titles such as "NASA Says 'Clearest Sign of Life' Found."
The scientists speaking at the press conference has made cautious, hedging statements such as "I want to remind everyone that what we're describing here is a potential biosignature that is a characteristic element, molecule, substance or feature that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before reaching a conclusion about the presence or absence of life." The headline writers ignored such statements, giving us misleading or deceptive headlines such as "NASA Says 'Clearest Sign of Life' Found."
The explosion of misleading hype and deceptive headlines should have been predicted by anyone familiar with the "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" tactics of today's "science news" sites, which have an uncontrollable tendency to produce misleading clickbait headlines, in order to generate more advertising revenue from online sites packed with ads.
The search of evidence of life on Mars has been a complete bust, with no convincing evidence ever being found for it. The main building components of one-celled life are protein molecules. No protein molecule has ever been found on Mars. The building components of protein molecules are amino acids. A functional protein molecule requires a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids, as unlikely to occur by chance as hundreds of fallen twigs in a forest accidentally forming into a functional, readable paragraph. No amino acids have ever been found on Mars.
The fact remains that the chance that life ever existed on Mars is extremely low, because of the failure of all Mars missions to ever detect any proteins or amino acids on Mars. It is impossible to overestimate how much the failure to find any amino acids on Mars is a "show-stopper" for all conjectures about "potential biosignatures" on Mars. The amount of functional information in even the simplest living cell is comparable to the amount of functional information in a set of hundreds of long, well-written useful paragraphs. Speculating about life arising on a Mars without amino acids is like speculating that accidental arrangements of fallen twigs formed many long, functional and grammatical paragraphs at some place (like the North Pole) where there are no twigs.
Why do misleading stories like these keep appearing on "Science News" pages? It's largely because when you click on some misleading but interesting-sounding headline, you typically go to a page with lots of ads; and someone makes lots of money from the public viewing such ads. The basic equation of today's science news pages is "Clickbait = $$$$."
Another big reason we got the very misleading NASA false alarm on this topic is that NASA was eager to get funding for a Mars sample return mission costing 10 billion dollars, and a few months before the "potential biosignatures" press conference, people were saying that the mission would be canceled. What better way to keep 10 billion dollars in NASA's purse than some hot air hype press conference trying to make nothing very interesting sound like a "potential sign of life"?
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