It's hard to criticise technology advances that are largely still lab-based. The number of people familiar with nascent technologies like carbon nanostructure s

It's hard to criticise technology advances that are largely still lab-based. The number of people familiar with nascent technologies like carbon nanostructure surfaces for battery boosts, for instance, is very small and the reasons for skepticism very technical and difficult to make a casual reader care about - sometimes you can summarize, sometimes it would take 500 words to even explain the basis of. Technologies like this are the bread and butter of TR - exercising skepticism is one thing, but if journalists were capable of finding flaws in years-off tech like this, they would be experts in that field, not journalists. We have to give some level of credence to the reports of the people in the labs, writing university research press releases, and so on. How many software startups have been breathlessly and noncritically paraphrased by almost every single tech and media outlet in the last decade, and how many turned out sour or "pivoted" within two years of those articles? It's not just 10-years-off science that's vulnerable to this, but I would say it's more forgivable in this subject than in something like reporting on web services and social networks.