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Thursday, 2 December 2010

New Life Discovered! (on Earth) - UPDATED

Posted on 10:54 by hony
Cat is out of the bag:
At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same. But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

It is not an overstatement to say this may be the biggest discovery in my lifetime. More to come.

UPDATE: I stand a little underwhelmed by the news. Researchers basically took a bacteria from an arsenic-rich environment and coaxed it a little further, until it didn't need the phosphorous at all. The bacteria wasn't already phosphorous free.
The smoking gun in exobiology will be the discovery of a bacteria that violates the current HONCSP requirement without tampering by humans. While this does have huge and far-reaching implications, it really isn't the thunderous breakthrough I was hoping for.
Sadly typical of NASA...


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