After reading this press release carefully, I notice that the paper mentioned in the press release was submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is essentially a publication that accepts most submissions from members of the "club," that is the National Academy. I wonder what additional steps would have to be taken to produce a paper that could get published in a more stringently reviewed journal. While we all look up other literature on the subject, I thought it would be a good idea here to mention once again my favorite hacker's guide to how to read research reports, by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google:
It's a mistake to assume that this was not peer reviewed. The PNAS has two tracks, stringent peer review and direct submission from members of the National Academy of Sciences. Every article is labelled as to whether it was reviewed or not, and the vast majority of PNAS articles I see are peer reviewed. Those articles that go through peer-review are typically of extremely high quality and impact; it takes a very strong paper to make it through peer review at PNAS, typically.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html