> If I were a science journalist writing an article about a supposedly shocking development like this, I would email some experts and check to see if it’s for real.
An attitude like that would have us all believing the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth. After all, experts of the time believed both wrongly.
We shouldn't take the experts on blind faith, but we definitely shouldn't take the challenges on blind faith either.
Without being up to date in the minutia of every field one will be ill disposed to judge which of 100 piles of nonsense extant at any given time are real discoveries and which bunkum and ones work as a journalist would be so compromised by the 1000 lies one spread that none should believe the one truth they uncovered.
I wouldn't credit anyone so stupid as not to consult ones peers.
As an aside, nobody really believed the earth was flat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
Your link only debates that during the Middle Ages people thought the earth was flat.
Those living in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt believed we all lived on a flat disc or plane floating in the ocean.