If this came from almost any other group it would be an easy write off. But NIST really does have some of the best analytical chemists and physicists around.
> The scientists’ results improve constraints on the strength of a potential fifth force by tenfold over a length scale between 0.02 nanometers (nm, billionths of a meter) and 10 nm, giving fifth-force hunters a narrowed range over which to look.
This is not surprising and it would be possible believe this sort of a thing from a variety of qualified groups.
It feels to me like this is very similar to the trend of only caring about positive experiment results and thinking negative experiment results aren't interesting. But they are! Negative results are useful and give us information! And are often crucial contributions toward positive results from later experiments.
This is presumably why dexwis seemed to think that it was so remarkable and that it might easily be written off as too-fantastic.
Probably starts in school. Negative results are just a loss of marks rather than a potential point of interest. Even if the lab report states that the results were unexpected and possible reasons given - it was an automatic fail. Never has it been considered, at least in my alma mata, that a negative result reasoned about might actually be interesting on its own and worth the time. Since aint nobody got time for that, said trend will probably continue for a long time.
Consider "New details about a possible Game of Thrones book release date" being a similarly unsatisfactory headline if the article content is "it's not in the next 12 months". Technically true, that is a new detail, but is it really what the headline implies?
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/k4xubh/have_we_as_a_...