Basically, you can't take any science reporting major media at face value. The headlines are written as click-bait, and typically in a non-scientific fashion. Some scientists are also prone to releasing catchy PR that misinterprets their results.
Though it is rarely cited, my favorite paper that I've co-authored is:
Indirect Evidence for Lévy Walks in Squeeze Film Damping: https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4926
It could have alternatively been titled: "Holy crap! Did you know that high-vacuum gas particles trapped between two walls follow fractal paths?!"
The result turns out to be scale-invariant, and was a surprise for us, as we had expected a nice integer power-law in the scaling of the gas dynamics, and it turned out to be fractional. The upshot is that when computing gas damping in high-precision force/displacement sensors, one must resort to numerical simulation.
One consequence of this work, in concert with the groups at Trento and MIT is that the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors opened up their gaps between the detector masses and nearby "reaction masses". The easy gaps to open happened before Advanced LIGO turned on, and I believe that the more difficult/expensive gaps to open are being upgraded roughly now.
It's fun how little table-top measurements on the minutiae of force-sensing can have impacts on whether or not we observe cataclysms billions of light-years away....
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/fm-wtd051718...
Of course, they would not be starting from scratch.
Or much of anything that comes out of The Guardian in general. Mainstream journalism is racing toward tabloidism, but The Guardian seems almost proud to be leading the pack.