What this whole process doesn't involve is anyone saying "Hang on, is this actually an important or interesting story". Does this invention move forward the cutting edge of desalination? Probably not. But it does boost MIT's reputation. Which is what this article is for.
MIT isn't more innovative than other institutions necessarily, but they are spending much more effort advertising their innovations.
That said, some of that is too sharp. There is some degree of "is this actually an important or interesting story." That's what the journalists/editors do. That's what the upvote button here is for. It also happens pretty extensively in HN's comments. The article itself expresses skepticism about the invention. I agree that it's not done very thoroughly, but skepticism definitely does exist in the process.
In any case, it's all pretty primitive. If this invention is worth discussing, it should be discussed. This article demonstrates how lame discussing with yourself is.
Where are the researchers, peers, people in the know. The subject matter here is a bad fit for factual reporting. We need subjective opinion. "Is this thing interesting?"
The three involved researchers from MIT are grad student Lenan Zhang, postdoc Xiangyu Li, and professor Evelyn Wang and "four others" which are not mentioned by name in the beginning of the article.
At the bottom of the article, it's mentioned that Zhenyuan Xu from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China is one of those "four others".
Everyone wants to work with and associate with institutions like MIT, so MIT gets to pick the biggest fools.
(This isn't unique to MIT; that's true of many of the elites)
NSF and other agencies do have a call to this kind of outreach, and the program officer told me they often would pick a grant from a more deserving school over a big-name, even if the big-name received better reviews.
So it's sort of luck-of-the-draw. If you get someone like me, MIT will hurt your chances. If you get the douchebag lady, it will help.
(For the record, I support this, it protects the grad students, who are not showing up at MIT for the PI’s research in most cases and most junior PIs need to be taken down a peg or two)
However, I do not know any easy way to exclude all translated from english-speaking sites articles and news to read only local ones.
(Not since I know these languages, but since I would like to be able to read some of those news.)
It feels like any topic on here is skewed by a factor of three towards the west, and a factor of ten towards the US. You could get the impression that 80% of the world population are doing nothing of relevance.
And .. yeh .. the Chinese research is essentially our secret sauce.
This is a much more general and tragic insight in fact, the vast majority of human experience is not available to you due to, among many other reasons, language barriers. Consider all the songs, novels, films, music, books and stories that you will never even hear about, because they are written or performed in a language other than the ones you know. If you know a second language, consider all the times you have thought "Oh gee, this is so much easier to express than in my mother tongue" about a neat idiom or grammatical construct, and think of the literal hundreds or thousands of languages that you don't even know the names of, and how full they must be of valuable new concepts and delianations and ways of thought and utterance.
Also I looked at what happens to top programming competitions winners: they are usually from China, go to the top university there, then quite often are happy to immigrate to US for a MSC/PhD.
My post was about top journals like Nature, Science etc...
The rich get richer....