It’s not extraterrestrial life, unfortunately – but this is still a hugely important discovery. They’re gonna have to rewrite – or at least amend – the biology textbooks. From Gizmodo:
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.
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, share the same life stream. Our DNA
blocks are all the same. NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team
have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know
today. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered
microorganism–called GFAJ-1–uses arsenic for all its building blocks.
This certainly seems to suggest that life might have a broader range – and take stranger forms – than we’ve previously predicted. Read more here.
