New Life Form Discovered!

http://blog.speculist.com/2010/12/new-life-form-discovered.html

Thoughts?

I heard about that.... pretty cool. Shows ya just how tentative science is.

Win

You beat me to the post.

I must stress that this is a HUGE deal. Not only does it finally prove that life can exist by other means than our own, but reinforces the now strong possibility that alien microbial life even exists inside our own solar system. Now that we have seen an arsenic substitute for phosphorous, is it not inevitable that we will find silicon based life forms as well?

Holy shit. This backs up those 'crazy' scientists who say life outside of our DNA is possible...

...

Yay?

i never really doubted that life that is extremely different from our own could survive but i thought titan one of the moons of Saturn had microbe life just frozen due to extreme cold

Prothean DNA

um, did you guys read the links it provided?

nothing says anything about it having arsenic in its DNA, just that it uses arsenic for photosynthesis, much like science believed early primordial lifeforms to do.

Well, it noted that instead of phosphorus, it had arsenic, and then notes that phosphorus is completely absent from its DNA, which would imply that arsenic is present in its DNA.

Arsenic is poisonous, this bacteria will destroy us all!!!!! Why isn't anyone panicing!?

Hehe,

anyway, these things can't exist in an environment without abundant amounts of arsenic, so I don't think there's much to worry about.

It is a good indicator that life can exist outside of the Earth model of Carbon based lifeforms.

A nice good bump to the hopes that there is other intelligent life in the universe.

there is other intelligant life in the universe.


I've met them, every day. they come from this small blue planet that im currently stationed on.

I meant not from Earth.

Oh... I thought he was referring to the internet at first lol


^ Small blue planets ^

Vigil wrote:I meant not from Earth.

In a way, I think he did too...

We watched that press release in Astronomy at my suggestion.

Read This:
http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/pagenum/all/

Two main points in the article if you don't want to read it:
-No lifeform that had arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA was found
-Experiments were poorly conducted and flawed

Thoughts?

I heard from someone else that the new lifeform was a prank done by a joke news website and that it spread to so many other that real news stations began to report the find.


I have no evidence... however

Gauz wrote:I heard from someone else that the new lifeform was a prank done by a joke news website and that it spread to so many other that real news stations began to report the find.


I have no evidence... however

As funny as this would be, i'm pretty sure the reporters were reporting on legitimate NASA-funded research.

However, the researches may still have just been trolling the entire world ^.^

Researchers aren't really allowed to do that, awesome as it may be. It opens up a whole mess of lawsuits and ethical red tape they like to avoid.

If it's anything it's either a poor paper which results are flawed, or the media overhyped and exaggerated it findings. Both have happened before.