capacitor, I understand what you’re getting at. But as Phobos mentioned above, the media is responsible for this sort of reporting, not the institutions.
It is true that some institutions (like Penn State, Harvard, CalTech, and apparently Brookhaven Nat’l Lab) are more aggressive than others in spreading the word about what their scientists have been up to. They do this by means of a well-oiled public relations office that sends out lots of press releases. News organizations like AP frequently use these press releases almost word for word when they need a little news filler, probably because they don’t have a whole lot of formally-trained science journalists to investigate and write original pieces. I don’t have time at the moment, but I could dig up an example of this if you’re that interested.
As to why the media choose to publicize the creation of the highest density matter in the universe over advances in cancer treatment, for example - that’s just the WOW! factor at work. Newspeople want items that really grab the public’s attention, and going for the superlative (biggest, fastest, most dense) fits the bill; incremental progress, however important practically, just isn’t exciting enough from a news perspective.
Kind of disappointing, I know, but that’s how it goes.
The new discovery is still nowhere near as dense as Managerium that has been documented at least as early as 1993. (It’s existence was noted as far back as the Roman Empire, but full documentation did not occur until recently.)
As far as mainstream scientific reporting, Fillet pretty much summed it up. I’d also like to add that in general, if you want to know what’s going on in the scientific world, the worst thing you can do is read mainstream media like newspapers. Read something sciency, like Scientific American.
In response to your other comments, I have two things to say:
Biological and medical research get vast amounts of funding, much more than physics, exactly because it is so directly relevant to so many people’s lives.
As for why physicists study things like light and atoms at very extreme scales, instead of making the best tire possible, is because the latter isn’t our job. It’s the job of engineers. Again, huge amounts of resources are devoted to engineering-type problems in this country. But some of the most amazing advances have come from unexpected directions. 50 years ago, if you tried to justify studying silicon band structure research on purely practical grounds, it would never have been funded. Then there would be no transitors, and hence, no SDMB. (However, we would be using some of the best steam engines you’ve ever seen.)
