Rosie Redfield has a "must read" post, Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA's claims). I won't excerpt it, read the whole thing. To me it is very interesting that many pieces of her critique are ones I've encountered in emails or Facebook postings. She stitches them together into a coherent whole. She'll be writing a letter to Science. Hopefully they'll publish it. Even if you don't have a deep background in microbiology and biochemistry I think it was clear that the authors had jumped to some inferences too quickly. (Acknowledgement, John Hawks) Update: Also, Arsenate-based DNA: a big idea with big holes:
So the Sargasso Sea tells us that some bacteria are capable of making DNA at very low phosphate concentrations. The most plausible explanation is that the bacterium GFAJ-1 can make normal DNA at micromolar phosphate concentrations, and that it also has the ability to tolerate very high arsenate concentrations.
This seems ...
