Started out making steel and fibreglass fishing rods in the 1950s. Pivoted to making high-performance antennas in the 1960s. This move makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but most people's initial reaction is surprise.
Without experimental data to back it up (e.g. implementation and benchmarks), I'd consider this claim veeeery dubious - regardless of who it came from.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and in this case it would be easy to provide such evidence - by cracking appropriately-sized challenge primes in a transparent way that can be independently verified.
On the other hand, the theoretical approach in the paper is quite complex and hard to follow - even for professional cryptographers.
There's a nice research article from 2016 by doctors in northern Norway about resuscitation of frozen patients:
“Nobody is dead until warm and dead”: Prolonged resuscitation is warranted in arrested hypothermic victims also in remote areas – A retrospective study from northern Norway
The standardization of Simon and Speck has been an ongoing fight within ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 WG2 since 2014 or so, but looks like it's finally game over for now.