"All Together Now"
Read the contentious "#arseniclife" paper online at "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." The study, by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues, was published on Sciencemag.org in December, then in Science's June 3 issue. Science published critiques in the same issue, under "Technical Comments."
A Nature reviewer who publicly critiqued a published paper spoke to Greenwire, a news web site. His quotes appear in "Endangered Species: Scientists clash on claims over extinction 'overestimates'."
"Nature Precedings" is the online forum where paper authors can solicit comments. Nature Genetics celebrated the forum's achievements in its editorial, "Standard cooperating procedures."
"E. coli on the March"
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collates outbreak information and important papers on its E. coli page.
"Going Viral"
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced its approval of two new drugs for hepatitis C in separate online reports: "Approval of Victrelis (boceprevir) a direct acting antiviral drug (DAA) to treat hepatitis C virus (HCV)" and "Approval of Incivek (telaprevir), a direct acting antiviral drug (DAA) to treat hepatitis C (HCV)."
In 1997, Charles Rice and colleagues presented research that showed that disrupting hepatitis C proteases stopped the virus in chimpanzees. They published their findings in 2000 in the Journal of Virology: "Hepatitis C virus-encoded enzymatic activities and conserved RNA elements in the 3' nontranslated region are essential for virus replication in vivo."
In 2005, Ralf Bartenschlager and colleagues confirmed that hepatitis C needs its protease to multiply. They published "Hepatitis C virus NS2/3 processing is required for NS3 stability and viral RNA replication" in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. More recently, in 2010, Bartenschlager reviewed everything researchers now know about the structure of the virus in Trends in Microbiology: "Assembly of infectious hepatitis C virus particles."
"Mouth Wide Open"
Christopher Kenaley curates a database of photos, drawings and measurements of deep sea creatures: Deep-Sea Fishes of the World.
"The Mind-Reading Salmon"
Article author Charles Seife uses "Habitual intake of flavonoid subclasses and incident hypertension in adults," published in February in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Aedín Cassidy and colleagues, as an example of "fishing" for statistical significance.
Read about the eponymous mind-reading salmon at "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction." Craig M. Bennett and colleagues created this poster to demonstrate the power of false, but apparently statistically significant results. They presented at the 2009 Human Brain Mapping conference



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