In Chrome's F12 tools I see three _utm.gif requests from the article itself. According to http://utmgifparser.appspot.com/, the three requests appear identical except for the "X10 data" ('utme'); not sure of the significance of that w.r.t. GA reporting. Any GA experts care to enlighten?

_utm.gif is the generic way that Google Analatics communicates back with its servers---there's no rest API.

So if you're doing things like event tracking, without counting the event as a page view, then you'll still see another request to _utm.gif

They appear to have one normal _trackPageView call in the header, then one or more other calls coming from within minimized JavaScript files.

Here's one:

     _gaq.push(["_trackEvent", e, t, n.toString(), parseInt(r, 10), !0])

This is the signature for _trackEvent

    _trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

!0 evaluates to true in javascript so this event is marked as non-interactive, and thus doesn't count as an extra page view and won't be used in bounce-rate calculations.

Presuming the other calls are identical, then their reported bounce rate should be correct.