science

I am a chemistry buff and also had a look at the original research paper. Aticle is open acess if anyone is interested https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-025-02055-9. So here is the way too long explanation.

Sadly no, they didn't discover an entirely new class of double bonds that are stable in this bent configuration. Instead those bent double bonds are very reactive and therefore can't exist for very long. But they are reactive in a specific way that proved useful for attaching those big 3D shapes to something else in interesting ways. That means that the double bonds are "used up" in the reaction and are no longer present in the new molecules they made.

The clickbait headline in general just puts way too much emphasis on the unusual double bonds. It is not a new concept in organic chemistry at all that double bonds can be strained (=bent out of plane) and that they become more reactive when they are. The perfectly flat case is just the most stable geometry for double bonds, which makes it more difficult to have molecules that force them to be bent. Because of this the bonds in this case could also be more accurately described as one-and-a-half bonds than "true" double bonds.

Brendt's rule (roughly, that you cannot have molecules where double bonds are strained this much) was not considered an unbreakable "principle that had stood for more than a century" at all. The first counter examples, including the ones in the article, already popped up in the eigthies, around 60 years after he established that rule. The remaining of the article actually represents the research paper pretty accurately, just the headline and first two paragraphs are heavily sensationalized.

TLDR: The molecules in the article are just two pretty extreme cases of bent double bonds that have been known for decades. The researches here "just" (this is still impressive work) managed to use these weird edge cases of double bonds for some interesting new reactions that provide a shortcut to structures that would be a pain to synthesize in another way. Is this actually immediately useful for drug discovery? Maybe. Someone made some interesting new shapes in an easier way for other scientists to play around with. Maybe that helps with something, maybe it does not. But now we have one more tool in the chemistry toolbox to try and make new helpful molecules.

This is an opening for a huge jump in medicine and other chemistry related discoveries/creations

Yes and no, this is giving more possibilities. There's no strong indication that these will actually be useful in those fields. But yes, it's always cool to have a new class of shapes to play with.