I am an indirect member of modENCODE project -- I am paid by the project but work on computational and data analysis and therefore not wed to it. I feel I should clear up a few things.

First, that 80% figure is a guesstimate, far from definitive.

Second, those "new" discoveries are "associated" by statistical tests. All popular reporting has sidestepped the issue by not explaining the quote around word associated. Basically it means they occur together above a certain statistical threshold. For vast majority of noncoding regions we know nothing about their functions, and this situation will remain for the foreseeable future. I don't have to tell people here that correlation is not causation. Recall all the reported health benefits of wine drinking; it is same degree of certainty.

Third, new technologies inevitably have teething problems, which have not been fully worked out. This means all reported conclusions comply with accepted notions within respective scientific communities. The data are not accurate and reliable enough to overturn any received wisdom.

Forth, yes, this means the main reported scientific results are not new nor that surprising to people in the field. But this is the way popular science and specialists interact.

By and large these papers represents a lot of hard work, but in terms of amount of data and research topics they are already being overtaken, as they should be.