NASA Discovers Arsenic Bacteria

**Opaque** · 02 Dec 2010, 02:53 PM

Source

The major finding announced today has fueled speculation recently that reached a fever pitch after the agency said the finding "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life."

While the discovery is not extraterrestrial life, NASA has indeed uncovered an entirely new life form on our planet that "doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living" on Earth, Gizmodo reports.

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.

So basically, they found a life form which has DNA and structure unlike EVERYTHING else living on Earth. This is a very big deal. There's a video on the page I linked to, it's interesting if you care about INCREDIBLY CRAZY SHIT.

EDIT: there's also some more shorter entries about applications with this bacteria under the video, they are crazy if you know anything about Chemistry and Biology.

**Opaque** · 02 Dec 2010, 02:57 PM

The official page on NASA's website.

**Doc Holliday** · 02 Dec 2010, 03:05 PM

cool beans!

**dave is ok** · 02 Dec 2010, 03:19 PM

Phosphorus and Arsenic are really similar so it's not totally shocking. It is cool how life just finds a way to happen though

**Cheebs** · 02 Dec 2010, 04:07 PM

I always got a chuckle every time somebody would talk about having to find Earth-like planets to search for life. Dude, for all we know there could be life on a star. It seemed foolish to restrict the search to "life that matches us".