There are two problems, only one of which is addressed by duplication. 1. The original study may be plain wrong. Author 1 claims to describe phenomena X, autho

There are two problems, only one of which is addressed by duplication. 1. The original study may be plain wrong. Author 1 claims to describe phenomena X, author 2 can't find any evidence for X using the exact same methodology. 2. The original study is wrong because the methodology is bad, interpretation is incorrect, reagents are not specific, techniques are not clean, etc. There's a strong argument to be made that it is more important to do orthogonal work which indirectly verifies the original results, as opposed to simply trying to reproduce the original work. This solves both #1 and #2. The paper cited in the article is a great example. Gluing hair onto a plastic leg and putting it in a miniature wind tunnel is probably an exercise in bad methodology—but they might have still gotten the right result for their experiment. And that's useful because now we know that there may be something different about either plastic legs vs. real legs or miniature wind tunnels vs. big wind tunnels. This is a trite example, but it should be clear how this might be more important in other studies.