Most of us natively write anti-clickbait titles.

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?!"

"You won't believe where these high vacuum particles go when they move, or how they get there!"

“The walls hate these particles, they can move in fractal ways, you can learn the secret, too”

A light wave got sucked into a black hole, you won't believe what happened next! I predict a new meme theme of taboola/outbrain style headlines that are actually semi-accurate sciencey clickbait titles. Genius!

Bait me with how this affects my car insurance and you've got a click.

These four tech giants are upending this centuries old industry... with quantum entanglement.

"Indirect Evidence for Lévy Walks in Squeeze Film Damping" is one of the most revered Vogon poems[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry

I wonder if this in any way related to (causes, or shares a cause with) Mandelbrot's discovery that electrical noise on a signal line follows a Cantor set pattern? Or perhaps the motion of the particle is due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? (If the exact position and velocity of a particle is not knowable in detail, then its path would have to have a fractal dimension overall.)

There's unlikely to be any direct link. The Levy-walk behavior is a simple consequence of geometry interacting with the distribution of particle directions that a particle might select each time it comes off the wall.

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....

REVEALED: How a high-vacuum gas particle learned to follow fractal paths using this one weird trick!

To be fair to scientists, it's usually the university public relations offices that write the press releases.

they are written in collaboration with the scientists and the scientists typically have input and limited editorial powers. When I was a PI I would never let the university PR publish anything that I thought was crap.

Here's the press release:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/fm-wtd051718...

It's a reasonable PR. Note that it focuses on an entirely different issue than "relearning flight".

I think you're taking an unnecessarily hard line. Flightless birds would, indeed, have to re-learn flight. It's not an exaggeration to say that. Sure, the basic hardware is still there, since they are, after all, birds. But they're not flying anymore.

Of course, they would not be starting from scratch.

> Basically, you can't take any science reporting major media at face value.

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.

I'm not sure what you are comparing it to. I think there are a lot of worse sources.