NASA Finds New Arsenic-Fed Life Form
December 2nd, 2010300 sextillion stars in the universe and people are surprised by this development?
Via: PC World:
NASA’s announcement Thursday afternoon has shown that alien life might have been under scientists’ noses all along. A press conference with a team of researchers revealed that alien life forms could exist in drastically different forms than previously thought.
Two years of study at Mono Lake near Yosemite National Park in California have yielded a type of bacteria that thrives on the toxic chemical arsenic. The elements necessary to support life on Earth are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. However, this discovery refutes the previously accepted idea that extraterrestrial life forms would be made out of these same DNA building blocks.
“We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new – building parts of itself out of arsenic,” said Felissa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology research fellow and lead scientist on the study. “If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?”
Yeah, but that’s only a N. American sextillion. Ho hum.
🙂
I think it’s one thing to say that other life form can exist and another to actualy build a new life form and prove it. Now that we discovered this life form, we will eventualy know how to search for it on other world and I think that’s where this news is amazing.
Personaly I can’t say I was really suprised considering the number of known stars, but I was totaly happy to hear this announcement.