I think you're missing the point of the article.

It is NOT about poison-breathing animal found in science fiction. Its main point is the possibility that a SECOND BIOSPHERE, one that we are unfamiliar with and thus undiscovered, may exist on earth. IF we can detect the existence of the second biosphere, we have a greater chance of finding alien life, simply because all life-detection techniques that are being used today rely on the premise that ALL LIFE is oxygen-breathing, carbon-based like us.

The impact of these speculations are tremendous. If a second biosphere exists, then a third may also exist, etc. This paper paves the way for us to seriously rethink our definition of life itself, and how to detect it. I think this is very exciting news, and most definitely newsworthy.

That is very true, as a new methodology if tested workable, can pave the way for future research in itself.

Another reason to split the methodology/result in two papers is that usually (in my area) a paper is very limited in page count, so you usually have no space to present a method, prove that it's workable, present result, and analyze the result. You can either do two papers with decent explanations, or one paper that is unreadable and makes no sense because everything is horribly compressed. People usually opt for the first choice :)

Or, you can opt for a journal which usually has a pretty liberal page count, but the burden of proving everything in one go is a daunting task that's best left in two publications.

What's new in this is the possibility of a life form to live in a highly poisonous condition, and breathe poison like us breathe air. This is very exciting indeed if she got some preliminary data (which she said she does) and publish it. Science fiction authors, on the other hand, do not bother to perform experiments and write papers. They just speculate. She is doing something with that speculation, with methods that are responsible and repeatable.

We have science and progress because of speculations like this. You can't expect every research to succeed, because if you worked in a research area, you know that is not the case. 90% of research simply fails, but the 10% that do succeed add many things to our knowledge (but then again, I just pulled that number out from my own experience, so YMMV).

Every time you read a scientific experiment that may seem useless, remember that in the 19th century, people thought that "all things worth inventing are invented already". Please do not fall into that mindset, because if that mindset takes hold, we'll be in the 19th century forever.