Arsenic life
heathero | June 6, 2011The 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…
heathero | December 1, 2010NASA has made a bit of a stir by announcing a press conference for tomorrow at 2pm EST. Scientists are going to reveal some exciting new findings relvent to the search for extraterrestrial life. Some people are anticipating/hoping that they will announce that extraterrestrial life has been confirmed. No one would be more excited than I (I love being able to make silly statements like this) were that the case, but I would bet a lot of money that it is, sadly, not. Don't get me wrong, I am super-excited about this announcement because most likely it is going to deal with extremeophile…