Genuinely a better question than most people realize.
Apollo 11 left a 2-foot wide panel of mirrors on the lunar surface in 1969. No power source, no wiring, no maintenance. Scientists have been shooting lasers at it from New Mexico ever since. The beam travels 239,000 miles, bounces off the mirrors, and returns in 2.5 seconds. That round trip is how we know the moon is drifting away from Earth at 3.8 centimeters per year. So yes, in a literal sense, they were checking if it would still be there.
The seismometers are the part that gets wild. Apollo 12 deliberately crashed its lunar module into the surface at 6,048 km/h. Scientists expected a brief shudder. The moon vibrated for over 55 minutes. On Earth, seismic waves from an equivalent impact die in seconds. Nobody had predicted this. So NASA did it again. Apollo 13 dropped its S-IVB rocket stage from orbit. Hit with the force of 11.5 tons of TNT. The vibrations lasted nearly three and a half hours.
The reason is water, or the lack of it. Earth's interior is damp. Moisture in rock acts like a sponge, absorbing seismic energy. The moon is bone dry, cool, and rigid. Shockwaves have nothing to absorb them. They just bounce back and forth through solid stone until the rock itself stops vibrating. Scientists described it as the moon ringing like a bell.
The seismometers ran for almost 8 years and detected over 13,000 seismic events. Turns out the moon has four types of quakes: deep ones caused by Earth's gravitational pull, shallow ones from the crust shrinking as the interior cools, thermal ones when sunrise thaws the frozen surface, and impacts from meteorites. In 2023, Caltech reanalyzed old Apollo 17 data and found a fifth type: the lunar lander itself creaking and popping every morning as the sun heated it. Every five to six minutes, for five to seven hours straight.
They went up to prove the moon was once part of Earth, measure how fast it's leaving, and figure out what's happening inside a world with no atmosphere, no water, and no tectonic plates. "Checking if it was still there" is honestly closer to the truth than most people's actual answer.
Now that everyone is an expert on curing pancreatic cancer in mice, not rats - I want to add some context that goes beyond the headline.
You will want to read this.
Cancer is cured in mice all the time.
Thousands of times. ~90% of those “cures” fail in humans.
Why?
Because mice are:
Genetically simpler.
Treated earlier.
Short-lived.
Not humans.
Mice are a filter - not a finish line.
Yes, this study matters. It comes from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre.
Yes, it’s pancreatic cancer - one of the deadliest there is. Yes, full tumor regression is impressive.
But here’s what it actually means:
“This approach is now good enough to risk years, trials, and millions of euros on.”
Not:
“Cancer is solved.”
What happens next?
More animal work.
Toxicology.
Phase I (safety).
Phase II (maybe works).
Phase III (beats standard care?).
Maybe 8-10 years if everything goes right.
The real damage isn’t failed drugs.
It’s failed expectations.
Every “cured cancer in mice” headline trains the public to believe:
Cures are being hidden.
Progress should be fast.
Scientists are lying when reality hits.
That’s how trust erodes.
Bottom line:
This is how real cancer progress looks.
Messy. Slow. Risky. Incremental.
Not miracles.
Not conspiracies.
Just science - doing the hard work.
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening, the fraud must be stopped.
@santostheGreat8 Not really. 105hp/250Nm at 1500 rpm for 1080kgs vs 138hp/230Nm at 2400rpm for 970kgs. Both have 6spd auto/manual but despite max torque on the demio coming in at lower rpms, the suzuki is swifter.
As someone who has actually lost a parent and saw hardship first hand , I would wish anyone even sent me 500 bob so that I could afford to not skip meals in campus.
When someone decides to help , take it with both hands in whatever form it comes.
Dear young, single men — I'm going to save you a lot of future anguish by explaining something.
Men evolved language to hunt dangerous game in teams
Women evolved language so they could loudly and vehemently declare fealty to the social matrix and not be left alone in the wilderness to die.
This means that it is quite possible for an entire group of women to sit in a room and loudly declare one thing to each other, while each and every one of them privately thinks the exact opposite.
In fact, the more women there are in the room, the more likely this is to happen.
And social media is the largest room in the world.
If you wish to understand women, you must never forget this, and never assume she believes or feels a thing merely because she says she believes or feels a thing.
And the more people a woman thinks are watching, the less you should believe what she says about herself.
Instead, to find out what she wants, thinks, or feels, you must focus on watching what she does, rather than listening to what she says.
It's called "revealed preference".
Means just what it sounds like. Preferences that are revealed by observation. That's the only way you're ever going to know anything about a woman's real feelings, real beliefs, real desires.
It's not that they will never tell the truth. Sometimes they will... if that truth feels safe to tell. If it won't single them out for persecution by other women. If no one will ever know.
But you can never tell, not directly, which moments those are. Sometimes even the women themselves cannot tell, because the social-alignment reflex runs so deep that sometimes women themselves do not know what they want, or what their real opinions are.
Needless to say, since women don't ever want to be misaligned with the social matrix, they don't ever want it pointed out that their efforts to declare fealty to it may be performative and insincere.
So if a woman tells you that she likes a sensitive man who is in touch with his feelings, or that big muscles are gross, or that explicit verbal consent is sexy, here's what you do.
Instead of imagining her as another adult male who has just lied to you with malice and intent to deceive...
Imagine that she is a six year old girl. And she has just told you that she is a dinosaur.
If a six year old girl tells you that she is a dinosaur, you don't angrily insist that she is not. You don't give her a lecture on the importance of telling the truth.
You say "That's nice, dear. What kind of dinosaur are you?"
And then file the answer in the Make-Believe Box. Because that's what she's doing. She isn't lying, at least not in the sense that you would use that word to refer to what a man might do. She's playing Make-Believe with you.
So, when it is Make-Believe Time, you play You Are A Dinosaur with her. And when it's serious time, you don't try to persuade her to admit out loud that she isn't a dinosaur, or a magic princess, or whatever. She already knows that. She just can't say it.
You just go ahead and treat like what she really is... a six year old girl.