Thank you for explaining the background to this eye-catching submission. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously.

The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

[1] "The Science News Cycle" http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

[2] "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles" http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

[3] "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

P.S. The sparsity of details in the press release recycled by ScienceDaily reminds me of the many past complaints from Hacker News participants about the poor quality of ScienceDaily as a source. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. I learned from other participants here on HN that there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."