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I’m always impressed by “science” articles that liberally use words like “could” and “might”. I guess the mad scramble for grant money means that these research groups have to constantly bombard the blogoverse with creative claptrap. It’s sad to see astronomy going the same route as medicine with the din of smart sounding horse-puckey.

At one time eugenics was “settled science”. “Brain chemical imbalance” is another example of senseless pseudo-scientific creative imagination. All you have to do is put a PhD behind the name and the media will print anything, no matter how obviously stupid.

Scientists have to dance this annoying two-step because of the "problem of induction", i.e. anything discovered from empirical observations can never be conclusive because there can always be something that was missed or is yet to be seen. This is often referred to as the "Black Swan" problem.

Scientists would like to pretend they are realists and are really discovering things like electrons, quarks, etc. However because they have never seen these things directly they are limited to being pragmatists, i.e. that which works is that which is true rather than that which is is true.

In order to continue to assuage the public and get grant money they have to claim they know things, but they also know that they can never know anything for sure. Thus the prevalence of all of the hedging words and phrases.

If the public understood that billions of dollars were spent to create CERN's particle collider and all that the scientists found were traces that strongly suggest there is a vibration in a field that might contribute to some of the mass in bosons, and they've arbitrarily decided to call that a Higgs "particle" then the public might not want to give them any more money.