http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html
ahaaaaah !
what did they discovered ?!
Participants are:
- Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
- Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
- James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe
My guess is they have found some kind of "extremophiles". So a microscopic form of life. I would prefer it not to call extra-terrestrial as I kind of believe we have the same origin :)
NASA cooperates with the Japanese Space Agency, so perhaps it's from the just returned Hayabusa probe?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19730-spacecraft-is-first-to-bring-asteroid-dust-to-earth.html (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19730-spacecraft-is-first-to-bring-asteroid-dust-to-earth.html)
The Finnish papers said that the info was leaked already and what they found was a new form of life. Bacteria that lives in a toxic lake and eats arsenic...
hrrrrrrrr....!!!!!
ok, now i can't sleep!
interesting ....awaiting.....
so any news anyone?
I believe Freelancah is right.
Somewhere in Yosemite(??) they seem to have found a bacteria which metabolizes arsenicum, which in current biology is pretty unheard of.
The idea is that with this finding chances of possible life elsewhere in the universe greatly increases.
A couple more hours and we'll know! :)
yup, Freelancah is right :)
newspaper in here say the same thing...
I believe there is more too it than surviving on arsenic. I believe the microbes being studied have arsenic "in" their DNA sequence, which is must different than everything else on the planet. Ergo: the theory that they are not of this planet. Which isn't two far fetched scientifically. I remember reading the theory of our building blocks for life, very may have flown in on some meteor. Appears they may be hitchhikers in the galaxy after-all!
That's pretty interesting but not what I thought we were going to hear.
"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" : http://gizmodo.com/5704158/
Now I know why doctors are always puzzled when I see them... ;D
Just because it doesn't share some similarities with anything previously found on earth doesn't mean its any less ancient, it just means we haven't been looking in the right places or the right way yet. We're destroying our environment faster than we can research it. (I'm not being ecologically green or political here its just a mathematical fact, rate/volume of change versus rate/volume of study, etc.) I would not be at all surprised if we find other extremophiles using other chemical processes previously un-thought of, or even have to re-defining what an extremophile is in the not to distant future. There are the biological building blocks of life (as we currently know it) out there in vast clouds in interstellar space; there's also vast clouds of other complex compounds and we have yet do identify what they precisely are or indeed do.
Every single atom that is now on Earth was born of a dying star, again not fluffy thinking but a cold fact. So it is not unreasonable to say that life originated in the "stars".
Its also not unreasonable to start asking some fundamental questions about what life is in the first place. I suspect these ideas and questions will never be full answered but I also believe that asking the questions will change our perception of who and what we are as a species.
Love space stuff ;) ;D
Richard
You're obviously in a special mood Richard ;D
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11267.msg115393#msg115393 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11267.msg115393#msg115393)
Yep, I'm busted ;D
Thanks for sharing your A T O M S ;D