Journal lands in frying pan for claiming cooked eggs can hatch chicks

Northeastern Jilin province has dispatched a work team to investigate a local geography journal which recently published a controversial paper about cooked egg hatching chicks.

The Jilin provincial press and publication bureau said on Tuesday it will announce the results in a timely manner and will seriously deal with any irregularities found during the probe.

Zhengzhou city has also set up a team to probe the school whose principal published the paper.

The paper concerned is titled "Turning cooked eggs into raw eggs -- an experimental report on hatching chicks". It was recently published on Pictorial Geography and its authors include Guo Ping and Guo Tai'an from a vocational training school located in Zhengzhou, Henan province.

The paper describes that teachers and students at the school have been able to turn cooked eggs into raw eggs through parapsychological consciousness methods and have successfully converted 40 eggs which hatched into chicks.

The paper soon sparked wide criticism online, with many netizens questioning the qualifications of the journal. Public information shows that the journal is a regular national publication supervised by the Jilin provincial press and publication bureau.

Media reports showed that the paper's first author, Guo Ping, who is the headmaster of the vocational school, responded to the widespread criticism online on Monday afternoon by claiming that the paper was factually correct and the experiment involved science of turning back time and predicting the future.

The journal responded on Monday via media portals that the paper sounded metaphysical and would not be accepted through normal review process.

China Central Television released on Monday night a commentator's video, saying the paper clearly violated the scientific common sense and it was surprising the journal dared to publish a ridiculous paper like this. It said the publication of such paper not only brought great damage to the students studying in the vocational school but also hurt the academic integrity.

"We must question through what channel was such paper, which clearly could not have passed normal scrutiny, was able to be published," it said.

Zhengzhou's human resources bureau confirmed on Monday that it has already sent personnel to the school for investigation and will punish if any anomaly is discovered.