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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For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
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