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Arsenic - not poisonous to all life forms
New Life Form DiscoveredPer Gizmodo, NASA is preparing to announce the discovery of an entirely new form of life: Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. 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. We knew that there were bacteria that processed arsenic, but this bacteria--discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California--is actually made of arsenic. The phosphorus is absent from its DNA. 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. Posted by: Glenmore 2010-12-02 |
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