https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVSJLUIQrA0
BICEP2 was a respected scientific collaboration, and it ended up like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iasqtm1prlI
The even took a touching video of one of the participants notifying the theorist that predicted the result about their achievement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA
Just a two off the top of my mind.
I am inclined to believe a publication unless other plasma physicist come out with a contradictory information.
It's easy to be cynic...
The minimum is to wait for the publication.
Even then, scientific skepticism is the rule, not the exception. Especially in fields that are price to hype.
You can mess with stats and so on ( especially in social fields ), but it may be nigh impossible to present results in energy field that are not replicable and still claim a win.
Are we being distracted from something?
If they have a good result, they should publish it in a peer reviewed journal with all the details.
There were quite a few results in the last two decades that were announced by a press conference and turned out to be completely false.
And I'm not even taking about the details of this specific result.
Press conferences are not