Why so much success in arresting some guy who had sex with a broken condom, but no success what so ever in arresting a pedophile rapist like Roman Polanski?

According to the paper about 11% of its DNA/RNA backbone stuff is made of AsO4(3-) instead of PO4(3-) after enrichment culturing.

It substitutes phosphorus with arsenic, BUT it's not like it's entire DNA backbone (or m/t/rRNAs/proteins) is phosphorus free.

Looks like I was right on the proteobacteria part too. w00t!

I'm watching too (obviously). As usual I was right. Now I just want to hear about its phylogeny. If it wasn't related to other bacteria they would have said it already (and not call it bacterium to begin with). Anyways super cool!

Maybe it gets by with proton motive force alone?

I'm looking very forward to this announcement! Perhaps arsenic replaces phosphorus in this microbe's DNA backbone? That would be way cool! Then even more interesting would be, how this little fellow compares phylogenetically to archaea and bacteria (my wild guess is that its 16S and 23S rDNA sequences will much resemble those of proteobacteria). Or maybe it'll have no ribosomes (and doesn't show protein synthesis) at all? Perhaps it's the first cellular RNA lifeform discovered! That would be the sweetest thing ever, as it would pretty much "prove" RNA world hypothesis correct!

"The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect"

Actually that is very unexpected! Archaea dominate in oceans and sediments, not bacteria. This find is very surprising!

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1014074107

Probably not. Different viruses have different protein coats, and antibodies are very specific on what they attach themselves onto. Should we manage to find a way around this problem (creating specific antibodies for other virions), the next problem would be an even bigger one. Common cold is a positive sense ssRNA virus meaning that its genome is a single stranded piece (or pieces, can't remember) of RNA that functions directly as mRNA for making proteins. Herpes viruses are dsDNA viruses meaning that their genomes consist of a piece of dual stranded DNA. This "virus-crushing machinery (TFA used this word)" that the antibody activates would probably be of no use towards this kind of molecules. It might be of useful for the +ssRNA hepatitis viruses (but HVB is dsDNA virus) and HIV (AIDS IS NOT A VIRUS, BUT A STATE) which genome is also +ssRNA molecule, but I doubt this very much. It all depends on the mode of action of this "virus-crushing machinery". I'm guessing it means RNAse (stuff that breaks RNA molecules). At least HIV would probably be safe, because it becomes dsDNA (and part of your genome) very quickly once it has entered a cell.

That people are this stupid in such great numbers. FFS I could have done the math (and I assume all my classmates as well) back in 2nd or 3rd grade. How do these idiots manage to survive?

like this

There are 2 kinds of species concepts: theoretical and operation-based. Probably most known theoretical species concepts are: biological species concept (species is a group of organisms that can potentially reproduce within), evolutionary species concept (species in an entity that consists of organisms that withhold their identity from other entities in time and space, and which have their own evolutionary history and fate) and ecological species concept (species consists of organisms that share the same niche). All of them describe macroworld really well. However none of them apply to the microworld (mostly because they assume only vertical gene transfer (inheritance) but with prokaryotes horizontal gene transfer via conjugation, transformation and transduction is much more common). For bacteria and archaea we use operation-based species concept called phenetic species concept. We've decided that a PhSC species is a monophyletic group of cells that share many phenotypic and genotypic properties (for example 70 % DNA-DNA-hybridization, > 98.6 % rDNA sequence similarity, > 95 % average nucleotide identity and 5 Celsius delta Thermal denaturation midpoint). If we applied PhSC to mammals then for example everything between humans and lemurs would be of same species.

The study doesn't take into account bacteria, archaea nor unicellular eukaryotes. That's where by far most of biodiversity (species count and number of genes and metabolic pathways) and biomass (carbon and nutrients) lie. Typical macroworld arrogance :(