It is very hard. For most experiments, you're not trying to detect a few molecules of DNA. You can set up your detection sensitivity so that a tiny bit of contamination won't be detected. For something like this, were you are trying to detect very small amounts of DNA, it becomes much, much harder. Firstly, you use very purified reagents. All the reagents need to be aliquoted individually in a location physically separate from where the DNA is. This is typically done in a specialized clean hood that can be sterilized with UV radiation. The reagents are combined in a similar hood and then transferred to where the tube with the DNA is. All of this needs to be done using gloves that are changed frequently. Next, you have to be very careful about what pipettes you use. The pipettes from each step need to be thoroughly cleaned, possibly DNAse treated to remove DNA. Again, each part of the experiment should use different sets of pipettes. To ensure that things are not contaminated, you have to use various controls such as leaving out the polymerase, dNTPs, etc. I'm sure if you got some other biologists together, they could brainstorm about a dozen precautions. It's not impossible to do, but it can be hard. I personally have lost months of research time because I accidentally contaminated something. Replacing all my reagents to clean ones did nothing, so I figured it was my pipettes, but the problem didn't go away when I thoroughly cleaned them. Eventually, I switched to using different sets of pipettes for each step, and the problem resolved. You may say that I'm not a careful scientist, but while talking to people to resolve my problem, pretty much everyone said they've experienced something similar. None of use proposed and published any crazy theory to justify it.

Yeah, they did the proper controls on the DNA generation of frequency. I think that could, within the confines of current science, be a reasonable claim. They did not do those same controls on the transmissible assembly of DNA through these water nanostructures. That claim is the one I think is unbelievable. If I were writing this paper, I would make it explicit that these controls were performed for both experiments. The fact that they did not do this leads me to conclude they were trying to trick the reader into assuming they did.

I take back my assertion that this is a hoax. Apparently, this Nobel Prize laureate has a history of producing very tenuous science on this topic. I think he's actually serious, which is pretty sad.

I am a biologist by trade, and I can say that this paper is very, very poorly done. If it was submitted to any major journal in the field, the peer reviewers would tear it to shreds. Here is the big experiment: 1) Take DNA and place it in tube #1 diluted around 1 million fold 2) Separate it from tube #2 containing all the building blocks of DNA, but not properly assembled 3) In between tube #1 and tube #2 is a special piece of metal 4) Subject the entire thing to low frequency magnetic field 5) There is an induction of the DNA to emit oscillatory radiation 6) DNA replicate magically appears in tube #2 from the building blocks I can buy the assertion that DNA at certain dilution transmits some strange radiation. It's step 5 to 6 that I think is complete and utter garbage. They don't do the proper controls for step 4 to 5. What happens when no DNA is present in tube #1? What happens when there is no inducing field? What happens when the building blocks are present in tube #2? They clearly know that this is an issue because they do the exact controls from steps 4 to 5. The "synthesis" of new DNA can easily be explained by one explanation: contamination. DNA sequencing techniques are sensitive enough to detect one or two copies of that sequence. If any of their reagents, tools, or lab members got even a single molecule of DNA on them and transferred it to tube #2, they would see that result. This is a basic fact that pretty much all molecular biologist learns (usually the hard way, by accidentally contaminating something of importance). To give the authors the benefit of the doubt, I'll go ahead and say they have successfully duped Slashdot with a hoax spoofing the claims of homeopathy.

The prestigious science journal Nature recently had an article on the best cities for science. They have some really cool interactive graphs showing scientific productivity of different parts of the world and how many citations each place gets. What struck me was how quickly China grew in terms of volume of publications, but how poorly their articles were cited. Whether that is due to papers being published in primarily Chinese language journals, the papers of being of poor quality, or the scientific community ignoring important papers coming from China for whatever reason is unclear, but I think it shows that other countries have a while to go before achieving scientific dominance.

Typically, DNA is thought to be transcribed into RNA in an exact copy of the DNA minus random errors that occur due to poor fidelity of the polymerase that makes it. However, it's been well known for more than 10 years that RNA can be altered systematically through (still mostly mysterious) mechanisms called RNA editing. This is a well known phenomenon that is pretty much universally believed by all biologists. However, RNA editing was thought to be a mostly rare process that only affected a handful of genes. This group used new technology called deep sequencing that allows for high throughput, quantitative sequencing of millions of RNA molecules at once, and their results suggest that RNA editing isn't as rare as once thought. To be fair, this is an abstract submitted to a conference, so it only has undergone the most minimal editorial (not really peer) review based on a paragraph or so of presented data. This may all be an artifact due to some systematic bias of the sequencing platform. There are probably hundreds of other groups using deep sequencing of RNA, so it will be interesting to see if other groups can replicate this.

That's simply not true. I'll reference you this article which says that between 1997 and 2002, there were around 2700 patients in Canada admitted to the ER for acetaminophen overdose and 69% of them overdosed intentionally. That's about 370 people a year intentionally overdosing themselves with acetaminophen a year. In the US, 26,000 people overdosed on the drug over around 10 years. If the rate of intentional overdose is similar in the US and Canada, that's about 1800 people intentionally overdosing on the drug each year in the US. I personally know at least one person who attempted (and failed) to overdose on the drug. Dying of liver failure is a pretty nasty way to go compared to firearms, but anyone who has worked in any urban ER knows that intentional overdose is pretty common.