CycleCalcs News standards

What we cover

New results in astronomy and planetary science: the Solar System, the Sun and the Moon, comets and asteroids, exoplanets, stars, galaxies and cosmology, the missions and instruments of discovery, and what you can see in the sky. We read the research itself: papers on arXiv and in the journals, and announcements from observatories and space agencies. Many of our stories are results that get little other coverage.

We cover civil science only. We do not publish military stories, and a story never discusses military uses of a mission or technology. Planetary defense against asteroids is civil science, and we cover it.

How every story is checked

• Every claim in a story is recorded in a ledger with its primary source, the exact passage that supports it, and where in the source that passage is.
• Every number printed in a story must be in that ledger, or computed by our own sky engine from stated inputs.
• The headline claim needs a second, independent source on a different site, or the story does not run.
• Each story states its peer-review status. A preprint, a paper that has not yet been through peer review, is labeled at the top of the story, before the headline.
• Images are used only under a license we have verified at the image's own source, and credited exactly. We never use AI-generated images. An artist's illustration is labeled as one.

How stories are made, and the role of AI

CycleCalcs News stories are AI-assisted. A routine we built finds candidate results, drafts the story from the claim ledger, and draws the diagrams. Before anything is published, the story goes to independent AI reviewers: a fact-checker that fetches every source itself and re-checks each statement and number, an astronomer that judges the science and the diagrams, an image-rights reviewer, a brand editor, a long-form editor for clarity, a standards reviewer, and a language reviewer who holds every story to American English. A story is published only when all seven approve it. A story that fails is not published.

The rules the routine works under, including everything on this page, are set by the people who run CycleCalcs, who read what is published and correct it when it is wrong. The byline on every story is the CycleCalcs News Desk.

How we write

• The headline says what was found. We do not write headlines that hold back the result to get a click.
• No hype: a result is described as large as the evidence makes it, with its uncertainties, and no larger.
• We explain the result for a curious reader with no training in astronomy, and we link to our own explainers and tools where they help.
• When an object is in the sky, we say where and when to look, using positions computed by our sky engine for a stated place and time.

Corrections

When a story is wrong, we correct it in public. The correction is dated and added to the end of the story, a note goes at the top, and the correction is listed in the corrections log. We do not edit a published story silently. A story that cannot be fixed by a correction is retracted: it stays at its address with the retraction and the reason at the top, so the record is complete.

To report an error, write to info@cyclecalcs.com with the story's address and what is wrong.

Independence and advertising

CycleCalcs is funded by advertising and by the products we sell. Advertisers have no say in which stories we run or what they say, and no story is paid for. Links to CycleCalcs tools are ours; we do not take payment for links in a news story.