Wait, are we this dumb?

This has nothing to do with baseball or even sports, but since a lot of sciencey types read THT, I thought it worth noting. From an AP story about the size of our galaxy:

Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore. The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda’s equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it’s 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it’s denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, Calif.

When was the last time you saw even the most basic science story describe the concept of mass as “like weight”? Mass is mass and weight is weight, and the last I checked, it was a concept that was taught in grade school. Heck, when was the last time you saw a science story that felt it necessary to explain the concept of mass at all?