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NASA does find new life after all

I literally just wrote about the NASA astrobiology news conference that is happening later today and what NASA may be having the conference about and low and behold, the details have just been leaked! So much for the embargo by the Science Journal (or whomever leaked the details). Guess it was just too exciting for them to wait - and why not - it is very exciting! Gizmodo picked up the story.

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.

The story goes on to say 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.

More today after the news conference.

Watch the short clip below made by AAAS.org about how bacteria microbes can live completely off arsenic which support NASA’s astrobiology program.