Notso Fantastic
Fair comments, but surely part of the problem is that people are willing to pass comment based on inaccurate information (look through the thread for a number of examples). This muddies the water to a very high degree. At the end of the day, as a research scientist myself, I continually come back to the feeling that good science is undone by poor (often very poor) reporting by journalists. This seems to be a problem we share with the aviation community.
For information, the original paper openly details the source of the funding:
'This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of a feasibility study in the Future Integrated Transport Programme.'
EPSRC is the UK government research funding body for engineering:
www.epsrc.ac.uk
DrDave