Tom Clynes on His Pop Sci Profile of Wolfe-Simon
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 Scienc...
Tag: Arsenic
Arsenic is Life and the View From Nowhere
[Note: Major second thoughts at bottom; post retitled (formerly “Cutting to the Chase on the Arsenic Circus”)] Popular Science has run what strikes ...
“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 ...
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 th...
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...
Arsenic 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 tr...
Aliens Riding Meteorites: Arsenic Redux or Something New? (updated)
Note: This story exploded after I posted this, often in strange ways. Several updates are at bottom. A new paper has claimed signs of alien microbial life in a ...
Neuron 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...
A Funny Arsenic Smell Upstream — What questions is it fair to ask about squishy science?
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 bact...
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. O...