Comment by svara
> They're from a major peer-reviewed study published in Nature, the highest-impact journal.
No, the domain name is nature.com because it's in a Nature Publishing Group journal, Scientific Reports, which is their least prestigious journal.
It's a common mistake, and they do that on purpose, of course, to leverage the Nature brand.
It's also a mistake that implies a complete lack of familiarity with scientific publishing, unfortunately, which makes it a bit difficult to take your judgements regarding plausibility very seriously.
It’s less prestigious because it doesn’t judge papers on novelty, only on technical accuracy. For incremental research like this, it is an appropriate choice. The lower prestige has no bearing on the accuracy of their findings.