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Arsenic and Primordial Ooze: A History Lesson
In the Guardian’s weekly podcast today, I discuss the Wolfe-Simon Mono Lake bacteria paper with science editor Alok Jha and astrobiologist Zita Martins. Our post-mortem covers the hype before and...
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A Funny Arsenic Smell Upstream — What questions is it fair to ask about...
Are we squeezing everything we should out of the arsenic story? Some would say so. I’m not so sure. In a quick post-mortem yesterday on the Lake Mono bacterium, Brian Reid neatly ticks off how the...
View ArticleNeuron Culture’s Best of Year
I resist best-of-year roundups when I see the heads — but then find I usually like reading them, and lo and behold, find it instructive to do my own. While most of my attention last year went into...
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Aliens Riding Meteorites: Arsenic Redux or Something New? (updated)
The suspected microbe remains in the Orgueil meteorite, from J of Cosmology Note: This story exploded after I posted this, often in strange ways. Several updates are at bottom. A new paper has claimed...
View ArticleArsenic Paper Reviewer Can’t See Out of Ivory Tower
As the Bug said to Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black (at about 1:20 in clip above) “You don’t get it.” Even as the blogosphere tries to check the claims (and press coverage) of last...
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Arsenic Author Dumps Peer Review, Takes Case to TED
Back in December, when NASA-funded researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon caught criticism online for her paper asserting a particular bacteria was incorporating arsenic into its DNA, virtually rewriting the...
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Science Publishes “Arsenic is Life” Critiques. Game On.
Alert readers will remember the scuffle that broke out last summer December over the “arsenic-is-life” paper by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues that claimed to have found that a bacterium from Mono...
View Article“The Center of Gravity Has Shifted.” Carl Zimmer on the Arsenic Paper
In a wonderful post at Slate, Carl Zimmer describes the one wonderful thing about the whole #arseniclife paper published last November, and has identified what will probably be its lasting...
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Arsenic is Life and the View From Nowhere
Felisa Wolfe-Simon. Photo Tom Clynes/Popular Science [Note: Major second thoughts at bottom; post retitled (formerly "Cutting to the Chase on the Arsenic Circus")] Popular Science has run what strikes...
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Tom Clynes on His Pop Sci Profile of Wolfe-Simon
Tom Clynes Last week I wrote Arsenic is Life and the View from Nowhere, about a long, complicated story that journalist and photographer Tom Clynes wrote in Popular Science about Felisa Wolfe-Simon and...
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