As upset as I am about the U.S. losing out to a country smaller than Connecticut, the World Cup bids weren’t even today’s most important announcement. No, that’s actually scheduled for 2 p.m. EST.
All week long, there have been rumors of a NASA press conference scheduled for today. Bloggers tried to piece together clues, with some even suggesting that NASA might announce they had finally discovered extraterrestrial life.
At Gizmodo, Jesus Diaz has the scoop, and while it’s not aliens, it’s something just as groundbreaking:
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, shares the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
The discovery of this bacteria, found in the poisonous Mono Lake in California, promises to have widespread ramifications, Diaz says:
[T]his bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. 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.
It’s safe to say you can take everything you learned in biology class and forget it immediately. This is huge.
Uh, please don’t forget your high school biology. The DNA is still DNA, it just doesn’t require a phosphate backbone. The fact that a form of DNA is still the primary transmission of genetic information makes these creatures very much residents of Earth. Although, what’s really exciting about this news is that it changes the search for life. The discovery of organisms at deep sea vents were the first clue that organisms can adapt and may possibly originate in extreme environments. This discovery shows that life doesn’t need all the building blocks that we always assumed. Which means aliens, when… Read more »