It's not an "English speaking" thing, nor "trashy".

Moreover, that is not a paper; it's a blog article written with, and I quote the website's colophon, "Academic rigour, journalistic flair".

Or "calm down ur tits m8 get laid or smt" as an actually trashy english speaker would say.

Reading this as journalism I still wonder, why is the English speaking world so trashy?

Can you explain what you mean by trashy? Sentences like that barely register to me. Seems odd that to me it caused such a reaction.

The author goes out of their way to mention something off-colour. That's trashy. It doesn't add anything to our understanding of the paper or the topic.

In particular, referring to cross-breeding of related yeasts as "illicit" -- what could be the real purpose here, other than to be off-colourful?

Comes across as dry humour to me, but maybe that is just because I'm British like the Author. Injecting mildly sarcastic or "off-coloured" language into a casual piece of writing is very common. I half get where you're coming from though.

Agreed. The giggling-schoolboy attitude whenever sex is mentioned just has to die.

For some reason your comment reminded me of "No Sex Please - We're British"