Unless this some academic joke flying over my head, the author's contact info is listed as "firstname.lastname@oxford-biochron.com". This report seems hastily thrown together, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the results. It'd be interesting to see others run it or comment from Google.
That is not a joke. That is either email address obfuscation or to save characters.
That's commonly done in a bunch of academic papers where authors are from the same institution - saves space mostly
They are using it to define the word, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do from Wikipedia.