Half of NPR's revenue comes from payments from stations to run their programs, and most of the rest comes from individuals, businesses, and foundations. Those public radio stations are also mostly funded by listeners and donors.
Also, this isn't relevant anyway, because the article is about a dispute about a particular program that NPR was running.
[0] is a good article about this; not least that this has been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate spelling.)
You're right that the text you're thinking of used to be in that space, if you mean the "About" blurb.
But you're not right about the page contents. The "About" is github metadata, just like the partial commit message "android: multidevice capabilites and accessiblit..." that you can also find. And just like that message, it was full of typos because it's not public-facing.
But there is an actual page talking about the project, which is what we're all commenting on here, and which never contained the typo.
I think the title removed the wrong words to make it fit into 80 characters. The actual title is “The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed”. Removing “why the” makes the title ungrammatical. Removing just “science once dismissed” from the end would work better.
I agree that that would be a good way to shorten it, but the title itself needs to be changed ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "Key to why the universe exists" is linkbaity, and "1800s knot idea" appears misleading, since the intersection between what Kelvin said and what these researchers are saying appears to be just "knots".
Edit: The mention of Kelvin's original idea does make the article more interesting though!
Also, this isn't relevant anyway, because the article is about a dispute about a particular program that NPR was running.