"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. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. 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.

We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn't been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don't know about you, but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean."

via [Gizmodo] via [NOS]

Not sure how reliable this is, but it's definitely worth talking about. If true, it's probably the biggest discovery for the century. I'll update with more info after the press conference tomorrow.




EDIT:
I'll post what's on NOS (it's in Dutch so I translated it).

"In Mono Lake, a toxic lake in California, the U.S. space agency NASA discovered new life. It is a type of bacteria.

Mono Lake is in normal life almost impossible. It is full of arsenic. The microbe has found different characteristics than all other life on earth.

Building Blocks
In their views, all textbooks on biology and life rewritten.

All life on Earth consists of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, whether it's about animals, humans, plants or microbes. Our entire outlook on life is based on the combination of building blocks.

Primordial soup
NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon is leaving NASA to announce that its bacteria from Mono Lake, but no phosphorus arsenicum as building blocks in DNA, something that all other life that we know does not exist.

For the NASA search for life elsewhere in the universe, this invention are also important. Because if life is not solely dependent on the six nutrients, such as oxygen and hydrogen, then the probability that elsewhere in the universe of viable organisms to become more likely.

* More on this news can be seen in Labyrinth of VPRO and NTR

Tomorrow is full detail on a NASA press conference live over the Internet to follow. "

I don't think this is a huge deal, bacteria evolve pretty quickly and this kind of new life proves that new organisms can evolve quickly from material readily available.

Originally Posted by noor_toglaw

I don't think this is a huge deal, bacteria evolve pretty quickly and this kind of new life proves that new organisms can evolve quickly from material readily available.

It proves nothing.

Science, science science, dutch people, science, science, NASA, science, dutch people.

Question: why the heck is the space agency testing toxic California lake water in the first place? Space is the other way, silly NASA. Furthermore this research doesn't appear to be peer-reviewed in the slightest or published anywhere, like real scientific discoveries are supposed to be. As cynical as this may sound this really just seems more-or-less like a media stunt to try and get people excited about space again.

Either way.. I'd like to see some practical applications of an arsenic based bacteria. It has to have some sort of crazy enzyme we can make use of. Like when we found bacteria in hot springs we extracted their DNA polymerase enzyme and used it to create PCR technique which essentially modernized DNA research. i really hope they get something that cool out of this.

At the very least it shows the potential for life in areas otherwise thought unihabitable.

Originally Posted by REPLEKIA/.

Question: why the heck is the space agency testing toxic California lake water in the first place? Space is the other way, silly NASA. Furthermore this research doesn't appear to be peer-reviewed in the slightest or published anywhere, like real scientific discoveries are supposed to be. As cynical as this may sound this really just seems more-or-less like a media stunt to try and get people excited about space again.

Either way.. I'd like to see some practical applications of an arsenic based bacteria. It has to have some sort of crazy enzyme we can make use of. Like when we found bacteria in hot springs we extracted their DNA polymerase enzyme and used it to create PCR technique which essentially modernized DNA research. i really hope they get something that cool out of this.

This actually sounds a lot like the plot of Deception Point.

NASA isn't all about space though, they do research in a bunch of other fields too. If it's even tangentially related to/could possibly have applications in space, they'll probably research it.

Practical applications would be neat, but far from necessary. Having never taken a Bio course in my lifetime, or learnt anything Bio-related after tenth grade Science, I don't have any idea what could be made of this. Still, if the LHC has taught us anything, it's that we don't need practical applications of stuff to spend billions of dollars on it.

Looking forward to seeing what comes of this too, regardless.

U.S is only trying to divert attention of people from WikiLeak incident by mentioning something out of blue.

Source updated with pictures

yum a new delicacy i see

Originally Posted by REPLEKIA/.

Question: why the heck is the space agency testing toxic California lake water in the first place? Space is the other way, silly NASA. Furthermore this research doesn't appear to be peer-reviewed in the slightest or published anywhere, like real scientific discoveries are supposed to be. As cynical as this may sound this really just seems more-or-less like a media stunt to try and get people excited about space again.

It was a leak. A rumour. It was not an official publication (as of a few hours ago). So why in the world would it be peer-reviewed and yada yada yada?

Sometimes it's better to let a matter rest (until the facts surface) rather than analysing the crap out of it (as you usually do) and sounding like a know-it-all.

As for your fairly arrogant first statement, I'm not sure you know that most of NASA's activity is based on Earth. Most they can do out there is send probes and rovers and...well roam until they find something. Is there a problem with NASA doing research on California lake water? I'm sure they have their reasons, after all they're NASA. And I'm pretty sure they don't need to peer-review and publish their reasons or everything else they do for you to approve.

And the implications of this are HUGE. Not only do we now know that life varies a lot more than we expect, but the fact that arsenic, which is toxic to us, is an essential component of this bacteria means that life can exist on other planets that are no where close to being Earth-like. NASA may no longer so tightly focus their scope of research to Earth-like planet. Which explains why they recently equipped their latest rover with full colour HD MAHLI cameras and LED lighting. It's capable to taking a really crisp (15.4 microns per pixel) 1600x1200 photo of an area about only 0.5 inches long.








Anyways...it's been confirmed. NASA has updated their site, and it's all over the news. The definition of 'life' isn't the same anymore.

For those of you who are lazy to head over to NASA's site (which, by the way, includes a video on the new life-form; I'm unable to embed or link to it), here's what they posted:

NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical - 12.02.10


Image of Mono Lake Research area


Felisa Wolfe-Simon processing mud from Mono Lake to inoculate media to grow microbes on arsenic.


Image of GFAJ-1 grown on arsenic.


Image of GFAJ-1 grown on phosphorus.

NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.

Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.

"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."

This finding of an alternative biochemistry makeup will alter biology textbooks and expand the scope of the search for life beyond Earth. The research is published in this week's edition of Science Express.

Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur are the six basic building blocks of all known forms of life on Earth. Phosphorus is part of the chemical backbone of DNA and RNA, the structures that carry genetic instructions for life, and is considered an essential element for all living cells.

Phosphorus is a central component of the energy-carrying molecule in all cells (adenosine triphosphate) and also the phospholipids that form all cell membranes. Arsenic, which is chemically similar to phosphorus, is poisonous for most life on Earth. Arsenic disrupts metabolic pathways because chemically it behaves similarly to phosphate.

"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 Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and the research team's lead scientist. "If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?"

The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells.

The key issue the researchers investigated was when the microbe was grown on arsenic did the arsenic actually became incorporated into the organisms' vital biochemical machinery, such as DNA, proteins and the cell membranes. A variety of sophisticated laboratory techniques was used to determine where the arsenic was incorporated.

The team chose to explore Mono Lake because of its unusual chemistry, especially its high salinity, high alkalinity, and high levels of arsenic. This chemistry is in part a result of Mono Lake's isolation from its sources of fresh water for 50 years.

The results of this study will inform ongoing research in many areas, including the study of Earth's evolution, organic chemistry, biogeochemical cycles, disease mitigation and Earth system research. These findings also will open up new frontiers in microbiology and other areas of research.

"The idea of alternative biochemistries for life is common in science fiction," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "Until now a life form using arsenic as a building block was only theoretical, but now we know such life exists in Mono Lake."

The research team included scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Penn., and the Stanford Synchroton Radiation Lightsource in Menlo Park, Calif.

NASA's Astrobiology Program in Washington contributed funding for the research through its Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute. NASA's Astrobiology Program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life on Earth.

For more information about the finding and a complete list of researchers, visit:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

Originally Posted by Entropy

This actually sounds a lot like the plot of Deception Point.

NASA isn't all about space though, they do research in a bunch of other fields too. If it's even tangentially related to/could possibly have applications in space, they'll probably research it.

Practical applications would be neat, but far from necessary. Having never taken a Bio course in my lifetime, or learnt anything Bio-related after tenth grade Science, I don't have any idea what could be made of this. Still, if the LHC has taught us anything, it's that we don't need practical applications of stuff to spend billions of dollars on it.

Looking forward to seeing what comes of this too, regardless.

Good book, Vouch

Title/into is misleading, makes you think NASA found aliens. They just discovered a new type of bacteria which has evolved because of isolation.

Originally Posted by Commander

Title/into is misleading, makes you think NASA found aliens. They just discovered a new type of bacteria which has evolved because of isolation.

The title says nothing about aliens, or extraterrestrials, or life on other planets, or any location for that matter.

Who found it? NASA.
New? Yup!
Oh, and would you look at that. IT'S ALIVE!

NASA...finds...new... life.
Nothing misleading about that.