I routinely skip arstechnica articles. Too much sensationalism (for example the notorious ZFS article). It also collects way too much data about its visitors.

Depends on whether it’s skimmed. Your heart and arteries will thank you.

A bit of clarification about the quantum might help calm your nerves: to observe something means something such as light must interact with the particle you try to observe, and that very interaction changes the result of the observation. It collapses the wave function, and what you observe is just one of the possible outcomes. It’s not as crazy as you may think, but it’s very understandable that it may at first seem magical.