Life not as we know it: NASA discovers aliens on Earth.
The shores of the alien world: Mono Lake, California, Earth.Courtesy EeekBig news from NASA today, y'all.
NASA scientists are holding a conference at 2:00 EST today, and I hate to spoil the surprise, but word on the street is that they've discovered life on the planet Earth. Ah... but it's not what you think—word is that they've discovered life that's really different from everything else here.
Last year, I posted about the theory that this sort of thing might exist, but it wasn't until now that it has actually been discovered. Here's the gist: bacteria living in the mud of weirdo Mono Lake have been found to use arsenic as a building block of their bodies. That may not sound like much, but, if it's true, it would mean that these bacteria are different than every other living thing on this planet. Everything else that lives on this planet is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. These creatures use arsenic instead of phosphorous.
Aside from being super cool and different, the discovery suggests that if life can exist in ways we didn't think was possible, it can exist in places we didn't think life was possible. Like other planets and moons in our own solar system.
More details after the conference, hopefully.
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Here's NASA's press release about the discovery: Nasa-Funded Research Discovers Life Build With Toxic Chemical.
Sometimes it's fun to read the actual scientific journal paper, even if it is full of some rather complex chemical equations. Fortunately this one is available for free online.
U of M-Morris biologist PZ Myers isn't as impressed by this "startling news" as NASA wants everyone to be.
You can read Professor Myers' whole take on it at his Pharyngula website.
I read PZ's post, too, and I honed in on a different quote:
That is cool, and I think it does make these bacteria different than any other form of life so-far described. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that it's possible. After all, this experiment has been running for a while, and, as MDR points out, they did deliberately select bacteria from one of the most inhospitable environments we can imagine. But...so far, no other form of life can do what these guys can do. And it means we have to rethink, a bit, our chemical definition of life. That's amazing.
Gene just emailed me an interesting like on Slate:
"This Paper Should Not Have Been Published"
Several scientists seem to think that actual scientific process used in this research was spurious and doesn't convince them that the NASA scientists found arsenic based bacteria. It's interesting to see the discussion around this scientific "discovery?" in more far-flung places like Gawker and Slate. Yay science talk.
Yeah, it's cool that people are interested enough in this that the discussion is getting press.
I wish that were the case with more research—I saw this dismaying project the other day, which might come from good intentions (I hope), but it misrepresents research, and seems to encourage people to develop similarly reductive and dismissive attitudes.
On a side note, I always think it's funny how sort of... nasty, I guess, scientists can be. Not that they shouldn't be questioning each other's research—they absolutely should—but the way some of those quotes come across, you'd think that the NASA scientists were doing their experiments drunk in a bathtub, while playing hooky from freshman biology. Oh, scientific community... y'all are people too, I guess.
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