You're not bad at reading science papers, I suspect you have not picked up the techniques to read science papers. Imagine you're staring at a long and complex B

You're not bad at reading science papers, I suspect you have not picked up the techniques to read science papers. Imagine you're staring at a long and complex Bash script. And you don't know Bash but you do understand other programming languages. You understand the shape of what's there, but not the details. Now also imagine that the self-same Bash script is written in the tersest style possible without any consideration to how accessible it might be for the reader. That's most science papers. Once you understand how a paper is to be read, and different papers, e.g. medical, or observational (like this study) or computer science, will have differing common styles between them. So you're not bad at reading science papers. It is simply that nobody bothered to show you the techniques yet.