Posted on 12/02/2010 10:17:58 AM PST by Free ThinkerNY
Alan Boyle writes:NASA's secret is finally out: Researchers say they've forced microbes from a gnarly California lake to become arsenic-gobbling aliens. It may not be as thrilling as discovering life on Titan, but the claim is so radical that some chemists aren't yet ready to believe it.
If the claim holds up, it would lend weight to the idea that life as we know it isn't the only way life could develop. Organisms with truly alien biochemistry could conceivably arise on a faraway exoplanet, or on the Saturnian moon Titan, or even here on Earth.
"Our findings are a reminder that life as we know it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine," Felisa Wolfe-Simon, an astrobiology researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a statement from Arizona State University announcing the results. Wolfe-Simon is the lead author of a paper reporting the findings, which was published online today by the journal Science.
Four years ago, while studying at ASU, Wolfe-Simon proposed that some organisms in extreme environments might be adapted to use arsenic in place of phosphorus. Phosphorus is one of the elements essential to life's chemistry -- in addition to carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur. Arsenic, which is just below phosphorus on the periodic table, is poisonous precisely because it can take phosphorus' place in biomolecules.
"It gets in there and sort of gums up the works of our biochemical machinery," ASU's Ariel Anbar, a co-author of the Science paper, explained.
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com ...
Welcome to the Blob. Where's Steve McQueen when we need him?
So how would Napolean die on a planet full of Arsenic
So slipping arsenic in their drink won’t work.
RIP. Meanwhile, where's the fire extinguisher?
“Alan Boyle writes:NASA’s secret is finally out: Researchers say they’ve forced microbes from a gnarly California lake to become arsenic-gobbling aliens. “
How did they make microbes from California become “aliens”?
MSNBC doesn’t even want to call people from outside our nation “alien”.
What does this have to do with Muslim outreach?
ooops those pesky military microbes have been found...
Boy am I glad the actual annoucement lived up to all the hype. /sarc
Wait until the Muslims steal the idea and claim it as their
own!
If the claim holds up it would lend weight to the idea that life can develop in ways other than we expected?
Their arrogance and ignorance is astounding. They dismiss all ideas that don’t fit into the box they’ve drawn.
bump
Sen Boxer has been on the forefront of trying to rid the world of arsenic.
Even in naturally occurring areas she has brought in the weight of the federal government to regulate less of it.
No 'weight' has been added. It's still the fallacy of affirming the consequent.
"Their arrogance and ignorance is astounding. They dismiss all ideas that don’t fit into the box they’ve drawn."
The only box that truly exists is the one that life 'developed'. See if you can get out of that one.
Antimony poisoning. It has the same valence as arsenic and phosphorus
It is arrogant in my opinion for scientists to discount other possibilities simply because those possibilities don’t meet the requirements that scientists have defined by categorizing only what they have observed thus far.
One would think that if the scientific community has learned anything in the last twenty years, it is that the building blocks of life are far more complex than scientists ever imagined.
To me, it’s common sense that if life does exist on other planets, it probably won’t be life as we expect it because the characteristics of other planets are so different from Earth. One cannot and should not take observations made about lifeforms on Earth and expect those observations to hold true anywhere other than Earth. So I’m suprised that scientists are surprised to discover that life may develop in unexpected ways.
If science hasn’t observed it, then it cannot and doesn’t exist? So dismiss it as a possibility until it’s “discovered?”
It is an interesting and fascinating find, kudos to our scientists for discovering this. The Scientific Method works, new discoveries open a whole new world to us. Every scientist I know is excited when an old theory is challenged and using the Scientific method is disproved.
Great stuff, NASA deserves 5X the funding they get.
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