From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.
The article makes a big point about how this result is not common knowledge and not the commonly accepted viewpoint. To the extent that their paper was rejected for it. Are you saying they made that up?
I haven’t read their paper but… the idea that vaccines can prevent against diseases without harmful side effects is also “not common knowledge” fwiw (the level of basic science literacy in most of the Western world is abysmal), and if reviewers rejected the paper then there is a good chance that there is a reason for that.
If you are interested in this topic, here is an excellent (imho) summary video from 6 years ago, which around 9:30 talks about this identical topic. Enjoy! :-) Beware though, from someone who has been down that road: it will make you sad, and the more you learn along these lines, the less hope it will leave you that anything will ever be okay again:-(. I cannot emphasize this enough: I am nowhere close to kidding here.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
video
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Good bot.
Although that link spins forever for me.:-(
They copy pasted the Columbia University press release word for word. Which is unfortunately way too common on science journalism. The article just repeats the researchers claims which may or may not hold water. Their main claim that they proved that inter fingerprints aren’t unique is just semantic manipulation. That’s probably what irked reviewers. Their research doesn’t support their claims. At best, they’re proposing a mediocre application of AI to detect markers that were already known about.
That makes a lot of sense. It’s way too easy to spread BS the way that science journalism works.