WEIRD, BUT NOT AS WEIRD AS FIRST THOUGHT: Two studies show ‘weird life’ microbe can’t live on arsenic. “A year and a half after one team of researchers claimed they had bred a type of bacteria that could live on arsenic, suggesting that life is weirder than we imagine, two other teams have found that the microbe really doesn’t do anything with the arsenic after all. These two teams say that the microbe, known as GFAJ-1, is somewhat weird, due to the fact that it can survive amid ultra-high concentrations of arsenic. But they confirm the widely held view among microbiologists that GFAJ-1 did not rewrite the existing rules of life — an extraordinary claim that was implied by the initial study, which made a huge splash in December 2010.”