Secret success: equations give calculations for keeping conspiracies quiet

As this week's flat earth furore has shown, conspiracy theories are widespread, but a new study uses maths to examine the viability of large-scale collusion

The US moon landings were a hoax, a cure for cancer exists but is being suppressed by drugs companies, vaccinations are harmful, the Earth is actually flat and climate change is a fraud.

Hard to debunk quickly, the adherents of these supposed conspiracies are not difficult to find online. But Dr David Robert Grimes, a physicist and cancer researcher at Oxford University, has come up with a mathematical model to poke holes in them.