There are people meaner than I am

I got a surprising amount of criticism of my review of the arsenic-eating bacteria paper — some people thought I was too harsh and too skeptical and too cynical. Haven't those people ever sat through a grad school journal club? We're trained to eviscerate even the best papers, and I actually had to restrain myself a lot.

Anyway, I'm a pussycat. You want thorough skepticism, read Rosie Redfield's drawing and quartering of the paper, which rips into the hasty methodology of the work. Man, after that, the body ain't even twitching any more, and they're going to have to clean up the pieces with a wet-vac. It's beautiful.

More like this

Lately I've been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They've got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I'm not impressed.
It's four am, and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in a white house, and it's ringing. Something is happening in the lab. What do you want to answer that phone? Is it a physicist with the experience and knowledge to deal with the apparatus?