I personally am not a fan of phys.org for that exact reason - headlines are overhyped to the point of clickbait.
By the way, your comment was dead again, you might want to email a mod?
The guy only has 3 posts total to his name, including the one you are responding to.
Although I don't think it matches dang's recent comments about why some accounts are dead / shadowbanned, I'm speculating that under certain circumstances, new accounts might just start out dead and need to get a number of upvotes before their posts aren't automatically dead?
I know that sounds a little strange, but I've seen a number of relatively new accounts that are dead and yet don't seem to be spam or trolls. There's a little bit of secret sauce going on that HN doesn't want to be fully transparent about.