I was more bothered by the primary claim in the article: "Wounds closed halfway in less than 5 days versus a week or more for untreated wounds, the team reports

I was more bothered by the primary claim in the article: "Wounds closed halfway in less than 5 days versus a week or more for untreated wounds, the team reports today in Science Advances." There's a number of issues here. The first --- which isn't unclear in the article but bears repeating --- is that the study was only done with mice. The new dressing helps artificial wounds in mice heal faster than when the wounds are untreated. The effect on humans (or maybe it's for veterinary use?) is implied, but untested. Next, what's with the "less than 5 days" versus "a week or more" part? If the goal was accuracy rather than advertising, wouldn't it be better to compare a range against a range, or an average against an average, rather than an average against a worst case? Finally, why is a comparison against an untreated control even mentioned? Presumably no one thinks that "no treatment" is the best treatment, so why not compare against something real, preferably the state of the art? On the bright side, the actual paper (which to their credit is linked from the article) actually does this, and the apparent benefit gets smaller. Eyeing up the relevant chart in the paper (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw3963/F6.large.jpg https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw396...), it looks like 50% wound closure is obtained in 4 days with the fancy dressing instead of 6 days with a version without the special ingredient. This is a perfectly respectable increase, which makes it even more disappointing that the article uses the "a week or more" phrasing. Seemingly less reasonable is that the same chart also shows a chitosan treatment that has an even shorter time. There are some caveats that the measurements were done differently (no splint to retard skin contraction), and there are probably lots of reasons this might be better than something derived from shellfish, but the lack of mention of this in the article makes me conclude that it's an advertising fluff piece rather than a genuine attempt at accurate communication.