This is the only upside to living in one of the drier parts of the country. Hardly ever any cloudy days, so our solar panels offset our usage even in the winter, opening the windows at night in the summer cools the house down enough for the whole day, and our clothes dryer hardly sees any use since I discovered that even things I forgot in the washer were bone dry the next day with no smell. Almost makes up for the sinus-searing dryness. Almost.

I grew up in the South and firmly believe that AC is the only thing that made the area properly livable. The real sin is that there's plenty of people here who run their AC full-time, too.

the finding may be based on something as simple as poor sample washing to remove phosphate contamination.

This conflates two problems mentioned in the article: possible poor washing of arsenic off the DNA, since it apparently likes to glom onto things, and trace amounts of phosphorus in the salts they fed the bacteria that were trying to starve of phosphorus.

Uh, you do realize that it was published in Science. I can tell that you've really done your due diligence on this subject before proffering your opinion. Might even have skimmed TFA.

Perhaps only in scale. Or are they really expressing surprise that any journalists are dirtying their hands by working with big bad Wikileaks? There wouldn't be any news if journalists insisted on only talking with the kind of people you wouldn't mind your daughter bringing home.

The really interesting bit is this:

Kauffmann of Le Monde said there was no financial agreement with WikiLeaks.

"Never has anyone asked to pay anything, and if they had, we probably — certainly — would not have done so, because we never pay for news."

I've probably — no wait, certainly — wouldn't have stolen candy from that baby. I never do that kind of thing.

Indeed, my translation explicitly excludes the possibility of there being no gods right after considering the idea, but otherwise roughly follows the same idea:

In all you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your own hands. If gods exist, you have nothing to fear in taking leave of mankind, for they will not let you come to harm. But if there are no gods, or if they have no concern with mortal affairs, what is life to me, in a world devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? Gods, however, do exist, and do concern themselves with the worlds of men.

My 1964 translation, however, doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to the version on wikisource, not just in style but in meaning, so that it's hard to believe it's even based on the same source.

Because if there's one thing Wikipedia hates, it's people actually using it's articles. But that's beside the point because they're using an archived version hosted on their own servers, which is why the featured article and such don't match.