I really like this study & feel like it reflects what grammar school instructs that science is supposed to look like. A hypothesis is proposed and tested, where

I really like this study & feel like it reflects what grammar school instructs that science is supposed to look like. A hypothesis is proposed and tested, where the act of testing is not mere simple direct observation (which in this case, as in many famous historical scientific experiments like Thompson’s, Millikan’s, & Rutherford’s, was inaccessible using more commonly-understood contemporary observational technology), but requires unique, oblique intervention of uncertain efficacy (the application of deuterium for the mosquitoes to incorporate) to bring out the response from the system to be observed. It would be really cool if scientific investigations could be regularly classified post-facto on this basis. But then a philosophical discussion: If the observation was trivially observable (by eye or by video camera), yet yielded the same finding, would it be any less an advancement of science as it is popularly understood? Would it be any less praiseworthy? And what if there had not been a hypothesis in the first place? Just a dry (no pun intended) observation (using technology that we understand doesn’t exist in the real-world) & accompanying posted dataset that happened to reflect that mosquito eggs persisted on-site through the dry season. Would such a dataset (again yielding the same findings as the real-world study) be any less ‘scientific’ or praiseworthy? I imagine there are philosophy-of-science papers on this topic - The title graphic of Wikipedia’s article on the Scientific Method demonstrates “This diagram represents one variant, and there are many others.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method Is the topic rigorously treated, e.g. not just whether a given study was observational vs experimental, but whether an experiment’s observational apparatus was novel & unproven vs contemporarily known? If a study employs hitherto novel & unproven apparatus, is it then more worthy of praise (and press articles) than a study of higher impact but that employs more mundane apparatus?