The arsenic story continues. After much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the controversial paper claiming to have discovered life that uses arsenic rather than phosphorus in its DNA, Science has published 8 critiques of the paper and a response by the author. You can find them here. I enjoyed reading them, and was surprised at how different they all were. I am not going to dive into this because the details are summarized in Nature News, and Carl Zimmer has a great piece for Slate that also discusses the recent developments in the context of the whole story and the broader lens of science communication.
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Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he's antagonized the agriculture lobby.
The 2 May issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has an interesting news article on the advancing use of arsenic trioxide against a variety of human malignanices, mostly cancers of the blood.
Back in May there were some stories on the wires and flublogia regarding a new study about arsenic exposure and risk of flu.
It's been interesting to watch as microbiology's own cold fusion debate has been raging. It began with an extraordinary claim about bacteria using arsenate as a replacement when phosphate concentrations are low (1).