NASA should give their next special announcement a code name and include Dean Kamen and Steve Jobs in the list of participants.
I bet they’re going to announce that if you take the tops of Orion and Taurus and add in the bottom of Auriga it totally spells out BOOBS because I’ve been e-mailing them about this for years!
Now there’s tea all over my keyboard.
I bet they found possible life on Europa.
My money’s on signs of microbial life in asteroid dust.
It is on NASA TV, so most likely it will be something more boring than a 2pm english class in the 9th grade.
I’m sorta hoping they do something that changes the world. I’m expecting “Hey, we found a protein in some dirt”.
What I want to see is some fucking Shai Hulud on mars or a dragon skeleton on the moon. The saucers land saturday! Or they might need to recruit mechwarrior players to pilot giant robots on this new planet of smurfs we’ve found.
I’m betting on protein in the dust though.
That’s funny, it was the first thing I thought of when I saw it.
Bacteria that can live in arsenic:
In a press conference scheduled for tomorrow evening, researchers will unveil the discovery of the incredible microbe – which substitutes arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth – in a lake in California.
The remarkable discovery raises the prospect that life could exist on other planets which do not have phosphorus in the atmosphere, which had previously been thought vital for life to begin.
Is that a new find? I seem to remember reading about those microbes a couple years ago.
… or maybe it was similar microbes that can live in ammonia.
“Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers were everywhere decades ago. Those old hippies were on to something with that.
Looks like The Sun and the Daily Mail broke the embargo.
Oooh? Alternate life possibilities? Is it non-carbon?
Shoot it!
NOT KILL I!
I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!
I think it was a mistake to hype this up the way they did. The problem I see: Isn’t Phosphorus much more abundant throughout the solar system vs. Arsenic? What are the chances of other moons holding Arsenic lakes vs. a big pile of Phosphorus somewhere?
Biochemically this is fantastic news, but for the lay person this is going to mean nothing.
Also, there was already a paper on Arsenic substitution for Phosphorous back in 1985
a b c d e f Holleman, Arnold F.; Wiberg, Egon; Wiberg, Nils (1985). “Arsenic” (in German). Lehrbuch der Anorganischen Chemie (91–100 ed.). Walter de Gruyter. pp. 675–681. ISBN 3110075113.
Bacterial growth is a myth.
Ars Technica has a better article on the subject.
Talk about overblown. It’s not even life that evolved to use arsenic – it is life in which they’ve tricked it in to using arsenic instead of phosphorus as a building block. The bacteria didn’t evolve to be that way, so this doesn’t actually say if it could or not. It simply suggests the possibility.
The chemist nasa has on suggests that the chemical bonding may be weak, and that the energy used to substitute for arsenic might be inefficient, leading to long term problems.