What I'm curious about is why they're using catapults at all - the Russians and the Brits, for example, use a "ski jump" instead. And I read somewhere (unfortunately, I can't remember where - damn you, source blindness!) that that approach is actually better, in terms of aircraft launch rate, as you don't have a complex catapult system that has to be reset for every plane.

So... why are US carriers using catapults, when they seem to me to be just another point of failure? Can someone enlighten me?

If a scientist other than themselves didn't make the discovery, it's obvious the other guy's methods are flawed!

Scientists can be such whiny, arrogant assholes...whatever happened to science being done for science, rather than recognition?

You do realize that criticizing research is a crucial part of the scientific method, right? Letting claims go unchallenged is the domain of religion, not science.
People are ripping apart this paper because it makes grand claims based on a potentially flawed methodology. If the results can be replicated with those flaws fixed, then the NASA team's research recieves further validation. If not, hey, I guess they jumped the gun. Either way, you have to identify the potential flaws, which is what people are doing here.

Also, to once again quote Rosie Redfield:

There's a difference between controls done to genuinely test your hypothesis and those done when you just want to show that your hypothesis is true.

So my question is basically what does it matter what they grew or washed the bacteria with when, in one of the many investigations, they found that gel purified genomic DNA had elevated levels of arsenic in them? Unless I'm misunderstanding what 'gel purified genomic DNA' means, I would assume that there's still several pieces of data in these experiments that point toward an organism that uses arsenic in place of phosphorous -- even if only somehow partially. Would this sort of spectrometry reveal any arsenic at all in my gel purified genomic DNA?

From Rosie Redfield's critique:

Could 400 atoms of arsenate per genome be due to carryover of the arsenate in the phenol-chloroform supernatant rather than to covalent incorporation of As in DNA? The Methods describes a standard ethanol precipitation with no washing (and no column purification which would have included washing), so I think some arsenate could easily have been carried over with the DNA, especially if it is not very soluble in 70% ethanol. Would this arsenate have left the DNA during the gel purification? Maybe not - the methods don't say that the DNA was purified away from the agarose gel matrix before being analyzed. This step is certainly standard, but if it was omitted then any contaminating arsenic might have been carried over into the elemental analysis.

Correction: it was 68Ge. As I stated, I couldn't find it in my data sheets, so I just looked at a list of germanium isotopes - which only listed naturally occurring ones. Silly me!

I do however have data for the next step in the decay chain, 68Ga (68Ge decays by electron capture, so let's just disregard that first decay). The first sheet I found put it at 0.103 mSv/h/MBq beta skin dose and 0.173 mSv/h/MBq gamma at 30 cm. At 684 MBq, that means a dose rate of about 70 and 120 mSv/h at 30 cm, respectively.
So no, these sources weren't particularly dangerous. Even at that close a distance (if you don't speak metric, 30 cm is about a foot), it would take half a day of exposure to become acutely ill (radiation sickness starts setting in at around 1 Sv). And as radiation sources don't tend to be that big, you can probably consider these rods point sources, which means that the inverse square law applies: at double the distance - only 60 cm - it would take four times as long.

This is supposed to be "News for Nerds" - so why link to a Fox News article with almost no technical information whatsoever? For example: what nuclide was involved? How high was the activity?
After some searching on Google News, I found this article. Apparently, it was 684 MBq of Germanium (which should mean it's 76Ge). Unfortunately, that isotope is not in any of my data sheets, so I can't tell you what that means in terms of dose rate...

Despite the fact that you're using "lol" as a word and thus deserves to be banned from all means of communication, I'm going to reply to this.

Thankfully the US doesn't have (m)any widely-used metro systems. How about implementing this on a bus as well ... lol Europe will never go for this, and this is another reason that I have no interest in returning to the states.

O RLY? And don't forget that the EU is for absolutely anything that violates privacy or decreases freedoms in any other way, so they will probably mandate it all across their territory.

Yep, that does cure most of what ails it. But 1) most people don't know how to do this, and 2) it's a damned nuisance even tho I can do it with one tick of a checkbox.

And then you've got to turn it back on to get any useful behaviour from Google Maps, tho they've become so cumbersome of late

Ah, but you don't!
If you're using Noscript, whitelist maps.google.com (by default, Noscript whitelists the entire domain - but you can whitelist subdomains manually) and gstatic.com. There's no need to whitelist all of google.com.

And hanging chads are an artefact of - guess it! - voting machines. In this case mechanical ones. Pure paper ballots work just fine all over the world - voting machines are needless automation, and can and will fuck things up.

Let me guess: The Advertising Option Icon will be a 1x1 transparent gif? :-)

Even worse, with some clever XSS you can make Slashdot post the same story twice!
Oh wait, that's just shitty editing. Sorry.

Science reporting at its best. I especially liked this quote:

The only way to glimpse what lies beneath its opaque clouds is by radar, and several missions have carried our radar surveys from orbit, principally the Magellan probe which operated from 1990 to 1994.

It's not like we have pictures from the surface of Venus or anything...

That goes for your post as well. While Venus is a fascinating planet in many ways, and I too would like to see more probes sent to it, your post comes across as crackpottery:

Even if all these probes can tell us is how blisteringly hot it is, that's got to tell us *something* about the environment. Venus sounds like a metal-ore refinery, and I'd love for someone to decide that it's worth a few (hundred) billion bucks to go get some of that Unobtanium (or whatever) and bring it back to Earth.

SQL and C? I'd use Chef for this task...

Amen. Not to mention that the EU has a history of bending over backwards for lobbyists, evil Orwellian shit and selling out its citizens' privacy to foreign nations.
So this declaration feels less like "Oi! Stop drafting that treaty!" and more like "Oi! Stop drafting that treaty without giving us a chance to add some juicy bits!".

THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!!

5 exclamation marks. In the words of the great Terry Pratchett: "A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."

It's a good thing when the information is relevant, sure. It's a bad thing when you're misleading people. Next you'll be wanting warning about autism placed on all vaccines. Sorry, but when your "information" is only there as a way of furthering the agenda of insane conspiracy theorists, it's definitely not a "Good Thing".

Straw man much?
An almost reasonable analogy would be wanting to make available, say, how much mercury is in each dose of vaccine. Like a SAR value, that would be a simple, neutral statement of fact. Of course, it would still be a straw man since besides Wakefield's thoroughly discredited "study", nobody has found any link whatsoever between vaccines and autism, while there is actual concern of harm from cellphone EM radiation from scientists (see the paper I linked for example). Mandatory SAR information laws are already in place in various places in the world, and AFAIK nobody has found any disadvantages to it. Around here, for example, it has just given consumers more choice: most people don't care one iota about it, but those who do can now make an informed choice.

Oh, and for future reference, "furthering the agenda of $group" is one of those phrases that set off people's bullshit detectors. With good reason.