In Modernist Cuisine, Myrvhold et al advocate for a sous vide chili oil. Roast the chilis and other ingredients at about 250 in the oven, then sous vide at 158. Never made it myself, and it's not intended to be authentic Chinese chili oil. They also mention using a pressure cooker instead, which seems reasonable.
A similar story took place with checkers in the mid 20th century. People discovered that Senegalese players, who played a similar but not identical game, had transferable skills and knowledge that allowed them to instantly compete with top professionals. One of them eventually won (or tied for) the World Championship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Sy
The sequence of mutations leading to Omicron is a one-off. Presumably, if there were a thousand variants with the same N mutations as Omicron, you'd see ratios like the ones you describe, but there's only one Omicron. The previous poster is pointing out it's plausible (~5% chance) that the path Omicron took has only 4 S mutations.
As one might guess, there is a lot wrong with this list even within there stated goals. My examples are drawn from mathematics, since that's what I know. They appear to use the journal to classify category, which doesn't work very well since many of the best results are published in general journals. Additionally, since citation counts vary so widely between sub-fields, there is a strong pull towards selecting misclassified work from higher-citation fields. For example the paper "High-dimensional centrally symmetric polytopes with neighborliness proportional to dimension" is listed in geometry but belongs elsewhere, and there are no probability papers in the category "Probability and Statistics with Applications". Also, the "Pure & Applied" category is meaningless. That list seems to be the most cited papers from five arbitrary journals. I guess it's a reminder that these problems are hard to automate, and that your work doesn't have to be perfect to share.
Certainly some that were active in the last 50 years, though it's hard to think of any that were trained in that time-frame: Gelfand and Ian MacDonald are the first pair that come to mind, though Gelfand had some great mentors and Macdonald did an undergraduate degree.
Since its proposal, the lonely runner conjecture has been an enticing open math problem accessible to anyone. Using polyhedral techniques, Matthias Beck (a prominent combinatorialist) claims a proof.