Agreed. Very important discovery.
So according to the NYT, they didn’t find the bacteria, but rather, “trained” it to use arsenic instead of phosphorous.
“The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.”
So, they went to a lake with a lot of arsenic, got some bacteria used to arsenic, and in a lab swapped it’s phosphorus’s atoms with arsenic, and that bacteria used to arsenic accepted that change. Important because life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. They changed phosphorus for a very similar one (arsenic).
Arsenic and phosphorus are also chemically analagous — arsenic is directly below phosphorus on your periodic table, and the elements have the same number of electrons in their outer shells, which makes them behave similarly
That’s it, in a lab, they substituted one of 6 key chemicals of life for a very similar one, in a bacteria that was used to that similr one. No ‘new life’, just playing with a bacteria checking how much it survives it we take some atoms and change for similar ones.
Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California,
meh…not in space still… move on..
rephrase the title…
Nasa Finds New Lifeform On Earth
Can Nasa just hurry up and disclose its knowledge of extraterrestrial intelligent life…we already know there are intelligences from outside of planet earth…
there is a massive amount of evidence that anyone can see clear as day if they make even the smallest effort…
Nasa, disclose what we already know.
@Player: I agree that the real news is a bit different from the short-lived hype, but it’s still something major. Bacterias can ‘use’ all sorts of chemicals to feed on. But in this case, they actually reproduced from a different set of basic elements than was ever observed before. Their DNA is built from very different components.
Oh, and as for the extraterrestrial intelligent life - at least we have proof they haven’t visited our planet yet: we didn’t hear them laugh about us. 
I thought it was abnormal, but not unprecedented for earth-life to use different building blocks in extreme environments. For example, deep sea creatures by thermal vents use CS2 instead of CO2. Its not that radical because the valence behaviour of O and S are essentially the same. Just different mol weights.
Are they using sulphur instead of oxygen for everything, or is it just the main food source and they are getting their oxygen from other sources?
The explanation at this site seems very good, I copy part of it:
What this group was looking for were hypothetical organisms that have learned to use arsenic instead of phosphorus. There are environments that are much richer in arsenic (and its corresponding arsenate salts) than they are in phosphorus. And arsenic is right under phosphorus in the periodic table, and forms similar sorts of compounds (albeit with rather different behavior), so. . .maybe it could substitute? Well, they didn’t find any native arsenic-users - but they did force some into existence. They took a strain of bacteria from such an environment (Mono Lake sediments) and starved it of phosphate while providing it plenty of arsenate. The colonies that grew under these conditions were picked out and grown under even higher arsenate concentrations, and the process was continued stage after stage.
The end result appears to be bacteria that have incorporated arsenate into their metabolism. They still have phosphate in them, but not enough to keep everything running on a phosphate basis. Some parts have switched over to arsenate, without gumming up the works completely. That surprises me quite a bit - I really wouldn’t have thought that things could be pushed that far. After all, in higher organisms, it’s that arsenate-for-phosphate switch that’s responsible for arsenic’s reputation as a poison. Eventually, some key enzyme systems can’t handle the switch and cease to function.
But not in these bacteria. They look different and grow more slowly than their phosphate-saturated brethren, and they’d clearly like ditch the arsenic at the first opportunity
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/12/02/life_with_arsenic_whod_have_thought.php
Bear witness to the new inheritors of Earth…
Just kidding.
I guess if I were a scientist I would actually care about this. It seems rather meh.
Thanks for ruining my holidays! Grinch!
Am I the only one who finds this to remind them of the movie Evolution?
No doubt we’ll be needing plenty of selenium and antidandruff shampoo to kill those opposite element loving critters when NASA and the space bureacrats hit s**t creak.
Actually, it seems that even that much wasn’t true.
Darn. Can’t we even trust NASA to get the science thing right?
Can’t we even trust NASA to get the science thing right?
We are talking about a governmental organization which wasted million of dollars because they couldn’t tell the difference between systems of measurement.