NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery

oh who gives a fucking shit.

@babar

This is wicked!

  On 12/2/2010 at 4:43 PM, azatoth said:

  On 12/2/2010 at 4:28 PM, Hoodie said:

i wonder how creationists will react to this. they hit us with peanut butter, we hit back with... a lake full of arsenic. fuck yeah.

 

Don't worry, they will find something equally stupid as peanut butter to refute this.

maybe they can go baptize themselves in the lake to celebrate the glory of god's creation.

News: There may be extra terrestrial life

or not

Illegal aliens founds in California... what else is new? ;)

  On 12/2/2010 at 5:27 PM, tidbit said:

Is that from Phase IV? Awesome movie, saw it when I was a kid and it had a profound impact on me.

First i was like

Now i'm like

  On 12/2/2010 at 1:53 AM, ET said:

id would love to know. for all of you who think they are not here...what do you think the ufo phenomena is?

 

 

1. what are the millions of reports of spectacular lights zipping across the sky for the last six decades?

 

2. what are the countless day time reports from all walks of life and professions, of metallic looking disc shaped object flying around our skies maneuvering like no known aircraft?

 

3. how do you explain events such as "the pheonix lights", where thousands of people all report a "craft" as big as several football fields long, hovering over their city?

 

4. how do you explain all the nasa satellite and astronaut footage of lights zipping around space making right angle turns at thousand of kilometers per hour?

 

 

these are basic questions that id love to hear your answers for, from all you who think we havent been visited

Ball lightning 'may explain UFOs'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11877842

  On 12/2/2010 at 4:03 PM, KY said:

BREAKING NEWS:

 

  Quote

NASA Finds New Life

 

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 ..

 

http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

wait wait, if the little critter even has anything that looks like DNA, we're not talking Abiogenesis.

This report says they took fairly regular bacteria and force fed them Arsenic until they adopted it as part of their structure.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11886943

Thats hardly 'discovering a new life form'

Maybe the life forms were found on another planet/satellite, but our response is being tested by the announcement of a domestic discovery. At least then abiogenesis remains unique to Earth.

  Quote

This report says they took fairly regular bacteria and force fed them Arsenic until they adopted it as part of their structure.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11886943

Thats hardly 'discovering a new life form'

Disappointing. Why bother calling it a "conference on astrobiology"? Future of life, sure. I'd be excited if this were a type of found extremophile.

mono lake

*labcoat boner*

  On 12/2/2010 at 8:59 PM, Atop said:

mono lake

I've swum floated there. Didn't know it had so much arsenic, I took a gulp while trying to stabilize myself.

Pretty disappointing news as expected....

  On 12/2/2010 at 9:30 PM, Ominous said:

  On 12/2/2010 at 8:59 PM, Atop said:

mono lake

Pretty disappointing news as expected....

Pfft, you're disappointing news

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/02/mono-lake-bacteria-build-their-dna-using-arsenic-and-no-this-isnt-about-aliens/

interesting article.

so is it a new life form or one that adapted to outside influence?

one can not just simply adapt to arsen to that level. So its a new lifeform.

Would be interesting how the other cellular mechanisms look like: Membranestructure, Proteins, Amino Acids, Metabolism etc

  Quote

The results do nothing of the sort. For a start, the bacteria – a strain known as GFAJ-1 – don’t depend on arsenic. They still contain detectable levels of phosphorus in their molecules and they actually grow better on phosphorus if given the chance. It’s just that they might be able to do without this typically essential element – an extreme and impressive ability in itself.

oops

  On 12/2/2010 at 10:41 PM, jules said:

so is it a new life form or one that adapted to outside influence?

They don't know

  On 12/1/2010 at 12:20 AM, GORDO said:

could someone please make a graph about the posibble excitingness of this so i can better understand the news?

damn right about now playing thread. it should be renamed, the "hi i'm drunk and bored and pretending to hope that ppl care about what i'm listening to thread." Perhaps though if we could somehow go through that thread and compile everything that has been listed by user, we could get some idea of the flavours in the lives of users. Oh god was going to write something more but the dog in the house behind is high pitch moaning and it's drilling a hole into my sanity.

bie

from the comments for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1 on wiki (yeah, super-reliable source, i know):

Somewhere Wolfe-Simon made the comment that she already has 14 other cultures from Mono Lake growing in arsenic. At present she doesn't know if any of these are different microbes than GFJA-1, but if they are then we would eventually need an article for the larger category of life.

i find this very exciting.