NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistry

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CJvR
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NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistry

Post by CJvR »

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/no ... ology.html
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov.
Anyone heard any hints of what this might be about?

EDIT: Updated title now that we know. --Lagmonster
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by Kyler »

From what Fox News says it may have to deal with recent researc about Titan that NASA may have detected possible evidence of arsenic based bacteria living on the planet.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Kyler wrote:From what Fox News says it may have to deal with recent researc about Titan that NASA may have detected possible evidence of arsenic based bacteria living on the planet.
*twitch*

*twitch*

Bacteria ? By roughly 100 Kelvin ? Damn. If it's the case, life is fucking badass.

... Well, I remember some years ago having read in a science magazine that some terrestrial bacteria had been accidentally transported to Mars, and that they where somehow managing to survive there (they where, of course, of the extremophile kind) . But I can't find any material on this matter, and it was more than five years ago, so it may be my memory fooling me...

[tinfoil hat]
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the UFO archives are opening in a certain number of countries (like Brazil, and the UK I believe) ?
Also, in the little world of the "mystery seekers", some photos have recently circulated on the net, coming from the NASA's picture from STS 88, on whose you can see something (1 - 2 - 3 : in the middle-left on the last two - please note that there was six picture originally, but the links are dead...) that don't look like your ordinary satellite, but more like an alien spaceship (personally, I recall that it looked more like a "Jumper" from Stargate Atlantis...) (and, by the way, if you can understand French, the GEIPAN is the way to go on the subject of UFO)
[/tinfoil hat]
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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If this were about the discovery of actual aliens or their technology, wouldn't there be some military leaders, engineers or even the President speaking at the conference, rather than exclusively astrobiologists? I know if I was Barak Obama, I'd be clamoring to make that announcement.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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^ Possibly. We'll see tomorrow, but I don't think it'll be something extraordinary.

Wait and see.

Another Tinfoil or Serious suggestion on what it could be, in the meantime ?

Ghetto edit :

[tinfoil hat]
For those interested : I found the set of six pictures, from NASA's archive site.
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1 - 2 - 3: ACCESS DENIED - 4 - 5 - 6
[/tinfoil hat]
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Your image links don't work.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Work for me, and I find those pictures profoundly unexceptional, which is no surprise considering you can barely see anything at all in most of them. How anyone could declare them ‘alien’ when public images don’t even exist for the vast majority of military spacecraft is beyond me, and even NASA crewmen aren't going to know this stuff because they don't have a need to know. I see reflections from solar panels, I am not being amazed. What ‘should’ a spacecraft look like? The damn things are usually wrapped in aluminum foil in the first place.

I do very much hope that this announcement is something on the lines of bacteria on Titan. That would be a huge leap forward for science and the ability of international space programs to get funded like they should have been this whole time.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by starslayer »

The fact that they even announced this embargo means it's not as big as it could be, honestly. Remember the Gliese 581 planet thing a couple of months ago? I had no idea anything was up until the day it was announced (along with most of the rest of the department), and Steve Vogt, the leader of that team, is my damned thesis advisor! So really, no one's found anything out yet (this includes Fox News). It could be something as simple as finding a much more complex organic molecule than we have found in space so far.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by Chardok »

I read something that spdculated that they had figured out a new way that organisms could metabolize a certain chemical and that they may have found evidence of the metabolized by-products on another planet.

Theoretically. I'll try to stay unexcited, but one can always hope...
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by The Romulan Republic »

FireNexus wrote:If this were about the discovery of actual aliens or their technology, wouldn't there be some military leaders, engineers or even the President speaking at the conference, rather than exclusively astrobiologists? I know if I was Barak Obama, I'd be clamoring to make that announcement.
Why would military leaders be talking about it if it was just some bacteria? Its not like they'd be a national security threat.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by adam_grif »

I've heard rumblings about the announcement being about an exotic bacteria-like organism found on Earth unrelated to other life on Earth, implying that life evolved twice or it was alien in origin. Either way would be big news.
The Romulan Republic wrote: Why would military leaders be talking about it if it was just some bacteria? Its not like they'd be a national security threat.
Obviously the martians learned their lesson the first time around and are using them to buff up their immune systems before they come back for round 2. 8)
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by Lagmonster »

According to a few peers who are in the know, it's not what the hype machine is saying. The most reasonable speculation I've heard is that this is about organisms with an arsenic biochemistry in Mono Lake. This makes sense, since at least one of the researchers who's name is on the paper has been involved with the Mono Lake research for a while now.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by Setesh »

Lagmonster wrote:According to a few peers who are in the know, it's not what the hype machine is saying. The most reasonable speculation I've heard is that this is about organisms with an arsenic biochemistry in Mono Lake. This makes sense, since at least one of the researchers who's name is on the paper has been involved with the Mono Lake research for a while now.
I found this in my inbox this morning
Gizmodo wrote:Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. 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.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn't been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor trillion of Earths.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

Post by Einhander Sn0m4n »

So, Arsenic bacteria? This confirms what I figured this would be about all along. No UFOs, no fancy hyperspace, warp drive, or disk-shaped starships. Just life doing something awesome.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Not exactly xenolife, but damn, this sounds cool to me. It looks like it's induced, not natural, but even so, it's an impressive result.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Hmmm, my lecturer promised he'd buy us all a drink if it was anything to do with xenobacteria. Yo reckon this counts? I could do with a free pint
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Eternal_Freedom wrote:Hmmm, my lecturer promised he'd buy us all a drink if it was anything to do with xenobacteria. Yo reckon this counts? I could do with a free pint
Since it was found on earth, no.
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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Eternal_Freedom wrote:Hmmm, my lecturer promised he'd buy us all a drink if it was anything to do with xenobacteria. Yo reckon this counts? I could do with a free pint
It might mean that xenobacteria in different chemical setups than Earth could be more likely to develop than previously thought. Maybe.

Good luck arguing it!
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Re: NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistr

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Damnit. No free pint :(
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Re: NASA have something to say?

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The Romulan Republic wrote:Why would military leaders be talking about it if it was just some bacteria? Its not like they'd be a national security threat.
They wouldn't. That's why they aren't. I was referring more to the tinfoil hat suggestions.
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Re: NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistr

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I'm left cocking one eyebrow at all the media response I've seen that seem to be making out like this is a new branch of life on earth separate from everything else that uses DNA as we know it, or calling it 'Alien life' or 'arsenic based life'.

It is wicked cool if there's a bacteria out there that's heavily substituting arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA but beyond an interesting metabolic quirk, the media hype seems to really be missing the point.

Maybe I'm a little jaded by the fact that I get surprised by the metabolic tricks bacteria can pull on a weekly basis. We've got bacteria in our lab that like to substitute selenium in place of sulphur in their amino acid cysteine; seleno-cysteine. It's not unique in the biosphere and doesn't require much of a change in codons to get it to happen. A couple of slightly less specific proteins and you end up with selenium inserted instead of sulphur. If you've got plenty of selenium around it starts to displace sulphur all by itself. And they do a little better with seleno-cystine, but still survive with sulphur only.
Heck, I think even us humans make use of some seleno-cysteine proteins.

If your valancy is right, arsenic is a pretty good substitute for phosphorus, at least in terms of orbital geometry, so I'm not that stunned an organism has figured out how to swap it out in place of phosphorus.

I agree with Molyneux, it shows that life might exist in wacky environments with all sorts of weird biochemistries alien to the 'standard' biochemistry we see on earth.
But I still want to strangle people calling this alien life or arsenic based life or life with a totally new form of DNA. It's not. Its good old carbon based ACTG bacteria with a funkybunch fetish for arsenic and a metabolism with loose enough morals to engage in threesomes with two different nitrogen group elements at once.

I reserve the right, however, to cream my shorts if someone does find something on earth that isn't carbon based. Like, say, lead. Someone should go looking for lead-based life forms down in the deep crust, that'd turn the search for alien life on it's head.
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Re: NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistr

Post by starslayer »

I don't find this very surprising either, now that I've read up a little more on arsenic's chemistry. It's right below phosphorous on the periodic table, so its chemistry (so far as valence electrons go and stuff) is virtually identical to phosphorous; AFAIK, a major reason arsenic is so toxic is because of its ability to easily substitute for phosphorous, which ends up inhibiting several enzyme reactions in most cells.

It's still a cool result, and was probably worth the embargo, but not truly earth-shattering.
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Re: NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistr

Post by Spectre_nz »

starslayer wrote: /Snip
AFAIK, a major reason arsenic is so toxic is because of its ability to easily substitute for phosphorous, which ends up inhibiting several enzyme reactions in most cells.
From a quick bit of reading up, it looks like Arsenic V is a closer analogue to phosphorus in biological systems, while arsenic III is the more toxic form - apparently arsenic III oxides have a high affinity for sulphur containing molecules, for instance, the cysteine that is incorporated into quite a number of proteins, and gums them up with terminal effects.

Selenium poisoning on the otherhand, I think is the result of substitution of sulphur for selenium in biomolicules.

And as an aside, If I’m remembering my grad chemistry correctly, the bonding arrangements of Arsenic and Phosphors are better analogues to each other than Carbon and Silicon, which would pretty much be why we've found a life form that's substituting arsenic for phosphorus before we've found one that's substituting silicon for carbon.
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Re: NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistr

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Spectre_nz wrote:I'm left cocking one eyebrow at all the media response
To be honest, I don't mind when new scientific discoveries get hyped in the media. Astronomy related findings are usually a small footnote (astrology however...).
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Re: NASA discovers bacteria using arsenic in its biochemistr

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wautd wrote: To be honest, I don't mind when new scientific discoveries get hyped in the media. Astronomy related findings are usually a small footnote (astrology however...).
I'm with you. Astrology "sensational discoveries" sometimes get full front-page coverage here (OMG A GREAT CHANGE TO HAPPEN IN THE ZODIAC CALENDAR! SEE WHAT SIGN YOU REALLY ARE!!!), things like Martian exploration barely get mentioned.

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