Can science journalism get any more embarrassingly bad?

"Real-time gene monitoring developed" says a headline over at physorg.com. The piece starts off with an insane hook that makes no sense whatsoever:

With GeneVision, military commanders could compare gene expression in victorious and defeated troops. Retailers could track genes related to craving as shoppers moved about a store. "The Bachelor" would enjoy yet one more secret advantage over his love-struck dates.

Then you get to the real discovery: monitoring gene expression in real time with Green Fluorescent Protein.  This is news? You might recall that this year's Nobel Prize was awarded for the development of GFP as a tool to look at gene expression in live cells.

All it takes to see gene expression in real time is to watch GFP with a camera that takes multiple pictures or movies  - which many scientists have been doing for years.

The real significance of the article is that a group developed a tracking system to watch GFP in a moving fly. (It's easy to monitor GFP in real-time when your experimental subject remains immobile under a microscope. A moving subject is obviously a lot tougher to monitor.)  These researchers are most certainly not the first people to look at gene expression in real time.

Even so, with this new technology, will The Bachelor "enjoy yet one more secret advantage over his love-struck dates?" Assuming that looking at your date's gene expression pattern tells you anything worth knowing, the Bachelor would first have to genetically engineer his dates to express GFP - at which point the advantage will not longer be secret.