Paper accessible via http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811914... if you have an academic login. Your points on experiemtnal design are good but I feel you're grandstanding a bit here; the reason the press release is posted is because it's so hard to get access to the text of scientific papers thanks to the publishing industry, so citing essays about experimental design ends up casting implicit aspersions on the quality of the authors' work, as if the paper would be more publicly available but for some reticence on their part.

I would like to see drastic changes to the journal publishing model, but I don't consider article inaccessibility to be correlated with flaws in the findings. To bring up the latter out of frustration over the former is poisoning the well of debate.

Incidentally, I found the paper in under 30 seconds by searching for the journal name, the senior author, and a few technical terms, all of which were in the press release and which gave me a correct first search result. It would be nice if the press release also contained a DOI link and other identifying information, but I can't really blame press departments for supplying journalists with the information they want and omitting that which most of them don't.