NASA scientist discover Arsenic-based life-form

[Dark Silver]

Hilariously enough...it's not out in space.

But out in California.

Gizmodo

GDI California....

NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth, using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything. Updating live.

NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic for all its building blocks. 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.

The new life forms up close, at five micrometers.

But not this one. It's a newly discovered microbe called GFAJ-1. According to Felisa:

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. 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.
We knew that there were microorganisms that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic, with phosphorus 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.

Even closer, showing their internal structure.

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. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life.

This opens up MASSIVELY, the types of life out there, and the potential for us to find out that no, we're NOT alone in the Universe....

And the potential for life to exist on Rhea, Saturn's Moon? Just went up a hell lot more in my book.

[Charon]

BWAHAHAHAHA!

Suck on that believers that life has to be carbon based and breathe oxygen...

SUCK ON IT HARD!

[Dark Silver]

Also, for future reference: If you put this announcement and at the end add: "Where is your god now?" in that exact phrasing and spelling, you'll have the more religious amongst your friends call you names.

It's fun.

[rhoenix]

The physicist Michio Kaku talks a bit about this on BBC:

Basically, "Crap - now we have to revise all our biology textbooks."

[Destructionator XV]

Note that it is carbon based mostly and still uses oxygen; it just replaces some building blocks of phosphorous with the arsenic. Though life forms do exist that don't breath oxygen...

(Similarly, but not completely the same as the idea of replacing carbon with silicon.)

Still very, very exciting. It works here, might work elsewhere too!

[Destructionator XV]

I'm told that it does indeed work elsewhere, and this is actually well known to microbiologists. Nevertheless the more variation we see, the better the odds get!