About Flash Science

Flash Science is an independent educational website built on one idea: the biggest questions in science deserve answers that an ordinary curious person can actually follow. Why does the Earth spin? How does a plane really stay in the air? Why is the sky blue? Each explainer takes a question apart step by step and puts it back together in plain language, with its sources shown.

Who writes this

Flash Science is written and edited by Sok Heng Oeun.

I am not a scientist, and I will never pretend to be one on this site. I am a writer who got tired of two kinds of answer: the one-line answer that is technically correct and explains nothing, and the textbook answer that explains everything and is unreadable. Flash Science is my attempt at the thing in between — a real explanation, in ordinary English, with the evidence on the page so you never have to take my word for it.

That means the credibility of this site does not rest on my qualifications. It rests on the sources at the bottom of every article, and on being honest about how each piece was made. Both are set out in full on the editorial methodology page.

How an explainer is made

Every article begins with desk research in authoritative, primarily official sources: space agencies such as NASA and ESA, government science bodies such as NOAA, the FCC, GPS.gov and the U.S. Department of Energy, professional bodies such as the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Academy of Dermatology, university teaching resources, and peer-reviewed papers where a specific measurement is being quoted. Every explainer ends with those sources, linked, so you can check any claim at its origin.

Established facts are stated plainly. Estimates, models and open questions are labelled as such in the text. Where a popular explanation is a myth — and in science many famous ones are — the myth is shown next to the evidence rather than quietly repeated.

How the pictures are made

Every cover and in-article illustration on this site is generated with AI image tools under human editorial direction, and each one is captioned to say so. They are illustrations, not photographs: they are there to help you picture an idea, and they are never used as evidence for a claim. Nothing on this site is presented as a spacecraft photograph, a micrograph, a measurement or a scientific figure unless it is credited to the organisation that actually produced it.

The portrait summary at the top of each article is an animated presentation of that still cover image with the narration text — it is not a video recording.

Corrections

Accuracy matters more than speed. If you spot an error anywhere on Flash Science, please tell me at contact@flashscience.org. Verified mistakes are corrected promptly and the article's last-reviewed date is updated when the change is substantive.

Contact

Story suggestions, corrections, permissions and privacy requests all go to contact@flashscience.org, or through the contact page.

Flash Science is a general-education resource. It is not a substitute for professional medical, legal, financial or engineering advice.