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.