Thursday, December 2, 2010

Nasa Discovers a Bacteria That Can Live And Grow on Arsenic

The more diverse life is found to be on earth the better chance there is of life being found outside our planet. I believe that chance was already 100%; but still an interesting find.

http://www.universetoday.com/81106/nasa-finds-a-weird-kind-of-life-on-earth

"No, NASA has not found life on another planet, but has found life here on Earth that is almost “alien” to our narrow, phosphate-based view of life. Scientists have discovered — or “trained,” actually — a type of bacteria that can live and grow almost entirely on a poison, arsenic, and incorporates it into its DNA. This “weird” form of life, which can use something other than phosphorus — what we think of as a basic building block of life — is quite different from what we think of as life on Earth. It doesn’t directly provide proof of a “shadow biosphere,” a second form of life that lives side-by-side with other life on our planet, but does suggest that the requirements for life’s beginnings and foundations may be more flexible than we thought. This means life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond could arise in a multitude of conditions."

1 comment:

  1. Organic-Inorganic Coevolution ...

    by Tony Ryals

    Before life made a cell it must have occurred,
    Carbon and minerals wrote their first word,
    It was the basis of the biospheric revolution,
    Organic-inorganic co-evolution,
    From the simplest life-form viral,
    To the most complex evolutionary spiral,
    Dances within a watery solution,
    Using the elements of organic-inorganic co-evolution
    Even the genetic strand has the phosphorous mineral in its carbon configuration
    Phosphorous holds not only the key to energy transformation,
    And life's respiration
    But is also essential to store life's genetic information,
    And eventually human intellectualization,
    And what would be chlorophyll,
    Without magnesium its carbon bonds to fill ?,
    Without the magnesium impetus,
    There'd be no photosynthesis,
    And what would be the enzyme nitrogenase,
    Without molybdenum to fill its carbonaceous space,
    Nitrogenase alone would lack the inspiration,
    To perform prokaryotic nitrogen fixation,
    Without molybdenum fertilization,
    And long before hemoglobin came along,
    Other iron-containing heme groups sang their song,
    Before these iron-carbon molecules evolved for respiration,
    They protected oxygen-sensitive molecules from oxidation,
    After photosynthesis led to oxygen's liberation,
    There'd be no vitamin B-12 or cobalamine,
    If cobalt hadn't co-evolved with carbon
    To make this vitamin,
    And what to the biosphere would it have meant,
    If selenium hadn't evolved with carbon
    to form an anti-oxidant,
    Molybdenum calcium iron and sulfur,
    Chromium magnesium potassium copper,
    Liebig's law of the minimum,
    And law of the maximum,
    You can't have too much and you can't have too little,
    You must be somewhere in the middle,
    Copper in feed lots makes pigs grow fast,
    But then their copper-loaded excrement poisons the grass,
    Can't survive the future without respecting the biosphere's past,
    The traces of life are in your head,
    Bacteria will use them when you're dead.

    http://malta.indymedia.org/node/8810

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