Fluid dynamicist who works in sprays here. No offense to the researchers, but the journalist seem to be overselling the research. I hear things like "we still know very little about how mist itself works", even in the field, but I don't think this is true at all. Actually, we know quite a lot.

Sprays generated by liquid sheets are fairly well studied, though I'm not an expert in the subject. I work in sprays generated by circular jets, not sheets. For circular jets, it's been known since the 1920s or 1930s that that they still break up in vacuum, contrary to some theories, but not all. This is somewhat similar to the phenomena mentioned in the article, and I'm not surprised by it. I'm skeptical of any particular study of this variety impacting all types of sprays. One of the researchers cited many different applications at the end of the article. But there are many different mechanisms, and their research only addresses one of them. So the overall impact is going to be limited by that.

Overall, good contribution, and I've added the paper to my reading list. But the hype isn't helping.

The writing was also shoddy in that the author claimed that it’s air differing pressure around the crest and trough that causes the sheet to break apart, but then said that the same results hold true in a vacuum with zero explanation. Not a great article...

Personally, I don't find ThePrint to be a high quality website. Their coverage of events and news is incredibly bad, no wonder they get science reporting wrong.