NASA Finds New Life Form
 

NASA Finds New Life Form | Wired Science | Wired.com

Has anyone else heard? I'll give you guys a chance to read up so we can discuss!

It was found in a "poisonous" lake... fascinating

This is great news!

Great discussion on this topic on the front page of "Reddit"

Have noticed a lot of "redditors" up in these forums. :thumb:

I heard rumours earlier on this week that they were making an announcement regarding advances in astrobiology. I must say I was kinda disappointed in some ways when they released this! It's great news, it's fascinating that they have found a form of life that is fundamentally different to ours (if an arsenic based on exists, what's to stop there being other forms as well?), and it'll be very interesting to see where it goes from here.

However, it isn't life on mars :(

I had a hard time loading your article 333, but that's fine, because I've already done enough research on this on my own. So apparently they thought that this bacteria used arsenic, which is poisonous to almost every known creature, in it's DNA the same way every other organism on Earth uses phospherus. If this bacteria was able to use arsenic in this way, scientists would be able to safely conclude that it is part of a different branch of the tree of life. This means life would have evolved twice on Earth alone, so naturally, it would have to have happened somewhere else in the universe more than a few times.

Sorry, I feel the need to explain that in the hopes that I'll cover something the article (which still won't open! wtf) doesn't, and because I'm a little bit of a biology nerd.

Anyway, this turned out be complete bull****. The newly-found bacteria did not use the arsenic in it's DNA, it was simply very reisitant to it. Extremophiles (basically, organisms that can live in "extreme" conditions) like this aren't unheard of. Many bacteria, insects, and others have lived in places with a high concentration of arsenic. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but this isn't a big, new discovery. It seems that all life on Earth does in fact share a common lineage, just as we have thought for a long time. This doesn't mean that all life in the universe has DNA exactly like ours, it just means that we've yet to discover anything that doesn't. Keep your fingers crossed.

EDIT: The page did eventually open and as I expected, it didn't say much more than I did.

Not saying you are wrong, but where did you find out it was bull****? Cause i would like to read up.

Yeah, my friends and I had a look earlier, the most anyone was saying that that it was possible that they just had arsenic in their cell structure, but even that is something that has never been seen before.

apparently the National Aeronautics and Space Administration couldn't discover anything in air or space so they went down. my friend says this is so impressive that maybe in a few years they'll dig deep enough to discover gravity and that earth's core is "hot".