This is research...

It's always "research". I put that in quotes because any press like this isn't really "research", it's "fund-raising". It's the academic game of getting papers into the right publications, getting "street cred" by getting the right heavyweights as co-authors and to cite you, to become a "heavyweight" by doing the same thing and ultimately getting more grants to perpetuate the cycle.

Research can be interesting but so often none of it goes anywhere, it's just hype and there's a reproducibility crisis in academia. Look at the decades wasted on academic fraud and appeals to authority with Alzheimer's research [1].

Most of this media is the academic equivalent of "dcotors HATE This guy".

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12397490/