[noobermin]

It's upsetting. Reminds me of when the CERN people made that paper about modulated plasma wave acceleration, and pretended they were the first to do it, or at least the popular press did. You only realize it when it's your field (as do I here) but we in physics ought to talk to each other more.

[dredmorbius]

An example I'd encountered was a set of papers out of the US Naval Research Lab on fuel synthesis (electricity + seawater => hydrocarbon jet fuel). The citations dated only to the mid/late 1990s, though it turns out prior art and development date to at least the 1960s (for electically-based fuel synthesis), the 1930s if Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from coal is included.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...

The impression generated was tremendously misleading.

I ended up digging into the history myself:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29ihl7/us_doe_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...

[pas]

Anyone following science (or tech, or medicine, or anything) news will (ought to) realize how over-hyped and fluff-heavy every press release is. Real breakthroughs are very few and far between, because progress seems incremental. And because usually those breakthroughs are unseen, uninteresting, not even press-release worthy, because we haven't realized its potential. Then someone tries out that new thing for that old problem, and gets maybe decent numbers, usually just meh. Then slowly it builds, and then eventually comes the paradigm shift. But at that point it's the waiting game, slow march of better and better engineering, getting better trade offs, and so on.

[cosmic_quanta]

To be fair, the authors are not claiming that this is the first time, only that this is the first time in this material. As you say, the press makes it up to be different than it is.