NASA Finds New Life!

[Haakzilla]

NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It's capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.

http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

we'll be all sucking arsenic alien cawk by the year's end.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

we'll be all sucking arsenic alien cawk by the year's end.

I might consider it if one of them is 10ft tall, 500lbs and agrees to play center for the Trail Blazers.

 

[Sex Panther]

a billion red dwarf stars harboring a trillion earths? yikes.

 

[huevonkiller]

Pretty cool.

 

[MARIS61]

a billion red dwarf stars harboring a trillion earths? yikes.

One day scientists will realize there is no number they can put on these things.

The universe is endless and infinite.

 

[jlprk]

We desperately need to find this alien civilization.

We left Japan's economy in tatters. The China pipeline will end in 10 years.

We'll have a Republican president either 2 or 6 years from now. Who will loan us the next tax cut for the rich?

 

[maxiep]

I wonder how many more planets this discovery opens up that can fit under the definition of "life sustaining"?

 

[Sex Panther]

I'm 50/50 on giving all this money to NASA.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

We desperately need to find this alien civilization.

We left Japan's economy in tatters. The China pipeline will end in 10 years.

We'll have a Republican president either 2 or 6 years from now. Who will loan us the next tax cut for the rich?

no shit, the virus known as the poor and middle class needs to find another host to sponge off for survival if they can't do it off the rich.

 

[Eastoff]

no shit, the virus known as the poor and middle class needs to find another host to sponge off for survival if they can't do it off the rich.

What about sponging off Parents?

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

that too!

 

[BrianFromWA]

this is pretty interesting, though I'd like to read the scientific stuff first...the news articles leave a lot of questions.

It's not a surprise that arsenic bonds with oxygen the same way (atomically speaking) that phosphorous does. Its activities, though, cause an ionic imbalance at the equilibrium normally found in "conditions suitable for life". Even in lithotropic biology almost every other organism eventually ends up generating ATP (one of the major phosphate-based "building blocks of life"), and I'm curious how this bacteria got around that. A lot of work has been done in prokaryotic biofilms that utilize arsenic, among other things, to produce electrical reactions. In a lot of these organisms that lack "normal" cell nuclei, it allows for a lot of things that are conducive to life in inhospitable conditions (like the ability to synthesize sulfates in deep ocean trenches, or photosynthesis in high temperatures, etc.). But again, they generally end up producing ATP.

So at the nucleate level for RNA/DNA, it's not a complete shock that the bacteria could form the helical chains with arsenic (when in a phosphorous-depleted environment) like the others. What is a shock is that it was able to thrive on the switch, since arsenic is notorious for its toxicity, even though humans generally have a decent amount floating around inside them at any one point (especially those who chew snuff), or how it was able to shift its genetic wiring to accept arsenic-based helical strains. Fun stuff for the 500# brains to figure out.

 

[jlprk]

The headlines imply that a new life form was found that occurs naturally on Earth, so it must on some other planet, too. But when you read the articles, they say that a scientist took a normal amino acid, substituted the phosphorous part with arsenic, and it continued to function.

So they created an artificial arsenic amino acid in the laboratory. They didn't find it occurring in nature. They didn't discover, they created. There is no evidence that this ever occurs naturally, here or on other planets.