Stacy McGaugh On Thin Galaxies

Astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh, at his Triton Station blog, observes that there are far more thin spiral galaxies than expected from cold dark matter halo explanations of galactic rotation curves. MOND does much better in this respect.

This is notable because MOND wasn't designed to produce this data point, and because once again, MOND is predictive while the LambdaCDM model of cosmology is not.

He is mostly highlighting results from a December 2025 paper by Benavides et al., that had escaped my notice in the daily flood of new astronomy papers. Some key illustrations from that paper:

q is a mathematical measurement of how thin a galaxy is relative to its diameter (roughly speaking, thickness divided by diameter). The chart above demonstrates how measurement effects driven by the angle of inclination at which we see galaxies make a world with many thin galaxies look more evenly spread.

This chart illustrates that LambdaCDM simulations dramatically underestimate the proportion of thin galaxies at all but the highest masses (and that many models don't even manage that match to reality at any point).

A final illustration is from one of McGaugh's own papers in 1998 and shows that MOND tends to produce flatter galaxies than Newtonian physics does (even though, unlike Deur's model, MOND is spherically symmetric, rather than relying, in part, on  the shape of a galaxy to demonstrate the dark matter replacing gravitational effect).

Neutrino Oscillations Disfavor Dark Dimensions And Right Handed Neutrinos

Two moderately popular beyond the Standard Model neutrino physics models are strongly disfavored by empirical data.

Right-handed neutrinos are naturally induced by dark extra dimension models and play an essential role in neutrino oscillations. The model parameters can be examined by the long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. In this work, we compute the predicted neutrino oscillation spectra within/without extra dimension models and compare them with the experimental data. We find that the neutrino data in the T2K and NOvA experiments are compatible with the standard neutrino oscillation hypothesis. The results set the stringent exclusion limit on the extra dimension model parameters at a high confidence level. The derived constraints on dark dimension right-handed neutrinos are complementary to those results from the collider experiments and cosmological observations.

Ai-Yu Bai, Auttakit Chatrabhuti, Yin-Yuan Huang, Hiroshi Isono, Jian Tang, "Dark Dimension Right-handed Neutrinos Confronted with Long-Baseline Oscillation Experiments" arXiv:2601.00790 (January 2, 2026).

An Alternative To MOND and Dark Matter

This deserves further attention. 

We present a new empirical model for galaxy rotation curves that introduces a velocity correction term omega, derived from observed stellar motion and anchored to Keplerian baselines. Unlike parametric halo models or modified gravity theories, this approach does not alter Newtonian dynamics or invoke dark matter distributions. Instead, it identifies a repeatable kinematic offset that aligns with observed rotation profiles across a wide range of galaxies. Using SPARC data [1], we demonstrate that this model consistently achieves high fidelity fits, often outperforming MOND and CDM halo models in RMSE and R-squared metrics without parametric tuning. The method is reproducible, minimally dependent on mass modeling, and offers a streamlined alternative for characterizing galactic dynamics. While the velocity correction omega lacks a definitive physical interpretation, its empirical success invites further exploration. We position this model as a local kinematic tool rather than a cosmological framework, and we welcome dialogue on its implications for galactic structure and gravitational theory. Appendix B presents RMSE and R2 comparisons showing that this method consistently outperforms MOND and CDM halo models across a representative galaxy sample.

David C. Flynn, Jim Cannaliato, "A New Empirical Fit to Galaxy Rotation Curves" arXiv:2601.00522 (January 2, 2026) (published at 12 Front. Astron. Space Sci. 1680387 (2025)).

Fairies And Fungi

* Fairy rings are a fungal phenomena.

* Fairies are often depicted as chthonic with underground halls, and eating fairy food traps you in their world forever. Fungi are one of the few living things that can survive and thrive underground without light.

* The Santa Claus myth and Christmas tree ornaments are deeply tied to hallucinogenic mushroom use by shamans in places where reindeer roam.

* Fungi are pervasively present in temperate forests which are seen as a natural habitat of fairies and were places feared in medieval times.

* Fairies are associated with glamours and deception, and many fungi, such as ergot, cause hallucinations and a sense of distortion of time..

* Fungal infections can make insects and small plants look and behave weirdly in ways that could cause them to be called fairies.

* The bane of fairies, iron and to a lesser degree salt, are inorganic while fungi are organic.

* Curious children eating mushrooms that cause their death or cause them to act abnormally could be associated with the changling myth.

* Fungi come in many varieties that are hard to distinguish from each other like fungi.

* Fungi have properties that distinguish them from "normal" biological things like plants and animals.

* Could "fairy dust" be spores or yeast?

* Mushrooms are of a scale often associated with fairies.

* There is a forests, fairies, and fungi sticker book anthology.

* Fairies are often depicted as amoral or having fundamentally different motivations than humans, which is a fit to fungi and its effects on mankind.

Signs That What You Are Reading Does Not Describe Reality

Look out for these key words in scientific claims that make it almost certain that what you are reading about don't describe reality, or has been misunderstood by a science journalist:

* Tachyons.

* Traversable wormholes.

* Anything that could make faster than light communication technologies possible (key point: quantum entanglement cannot be used to send faster than light messages).

* String theory.

* Supersymmetry.

* WIMPs (or even claims that WIMPs are well-motivated).

* Models with sterile dark matter of MeV particle mass or more.

* Claims that dark matter distributions in galaxies usually or typically have an NFW distribution.

* Negative mass or mass-energy.

* Claims that antimatter gravitates differently than matter.

* Claims that the Lambda CDM cosmology model is fully consistent with astronomy observations.

* Claims that understanding CP violation in the Standard Model could explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe (i.e. why matter is so much more common than antimatter).

* Tired light.

* Claims that scientists have created black holes on Earth.

* Perpetual motion machines.

* Claims that any widely used vaccine does more harm than good.

* Claims that vaccines cause autism.

* Homeopathy.

* Claims that autism doesn't have a large genetic component.

* Chem trails.

* Claims that human activity has not caused significant global warming.

* Young Earth creationism.

* Claims that a global flood really happened.

* Intelligent design.

* Gender ideology.

* Intelligent extraterrestrial life on Earth.

* Claims that people in pre-modern societies were less violent than modern societies.

* Claims that genocide didn't happen prior to the modern era.

* An Anatolian origin for the Indo-European languages.

* A South Asian origin for the Indo-European languages.

* A Neolithic origin for the Indo-European languages.

* Technologically advanced civilizations prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 20,000 years ago).

* The Solutrean Hypothesis.

* Claims that modern humans evolved outside Africa (although modern humans did experience admixture with other hominin species in small amounts outside of Africa).

* Claims that hominins as a clade evolved outside of Africa.

* Claims that ancient artisans were "impossibly advanced."

There are other claims that, while not impossible or more or less definitively disproven should be viewed with great skepticism:

* Explanations for phenomena that rely on new, beyond the Standard Model particles or forces (except gravity).

* Sterile neutrino theories.

* Claims that discrepancies between inclusive and exclusive measurements of something point to new physics.

* Any claim motivated by the muon g-2 anomaly (which does not exist).

* Claims of any baryon number violating process, or any lepton number violating process (other than sphalerons).

* Claims of Lorentz symmetry violations.

* Claims of charged leptons have any properties that differ from each other, other than mass (sometimes called "lepton universality violations").

* Claims that someone has seen dark matter annihilation signatures.

* Claims of CP violation or time-symmetry violation that don't involve W boson mediated phenomena.

* Claims of CPT symmetry violation.