NASA scientists are putting their ideas of life back under the microscope, after a surprising discovery in California.
They found an organism whose basic building blocks include arsenic, a substance that is poisonous to most things living on Earth. And that’s making them re-think what organisms need to survive – here on earth, and elsewhere.
After days of rampant speculation that NASA was on the cusp of revealing it had detected extraterrestrial life, the reality was slightly more down-to-Earth.
A team of scientists revealed Thursday that they had found a remarkable quality in a bacterium growing quietly in California’s Mono Lake — it is the only known life form able to subsist on the deadly element arsenic. The organism even uses arsenic to build the backbone of its DNA.
To researchers searching for life elsewhere in the universe, the discovery still qualified as a heaven-sent event.
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