[meteorite-list] NASA Astrobiology News Conference scooped by UKSun?
From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 15:21:37 -0600 Message-ID: <6055F4D132704C4FB1A3DEA9D470D16D_at_ATARIENGINE2> Hi, Rob, List, The experiements with Mono Lake organisms are essentially this: you collect a buncha them in Mono water, then you both add more arsenic and remove all the phosphorus, while heavily feeding the critters, until you end up with arsenic saturation and phosporus absence. Lots of species die, but a few flourish. Eventually, you should have The One. Whether or not it is significant depends entirely on HOW different it is. If it has a vast reportoire of special enzymes that shuffle the arsenic into harmless paths, it's clever but it's Earth Life As We Know It. On the other hand, if it uses ATA instead of ATP and more importantly if its genetic molecule does not have phosphates in its nucleotide backbone... well, is that even "DNA"? The answer is in the genes. If they are comparable to other becteria genomes, then we have Weird Life. If they are different and incomprehensible (at first), we may have Other Life. Whether that would be a very early split in one lineage, or two lineages... well, that's the question, isn't it? Here we are, gazing back fondly to our first primitive ancestor, and at the same time, somebody is throwing their own Creation of Life over in the next county... That would be news. Sterling K. Webb -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matson, Robert D." <ROBERT.D.MATSON at saic.com> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 2:16 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] NASA Astrobiology News Conference scooped by UKSun? > Hopefully *this* isn't the extent of the NASA news: > > http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3253913/NASA-researchers-find- > life-in-poisonous-arsenic-lake-in-USA.html > > http://www.geekosystem.com/nasa-press-conference-arsenic/ > > --Rob > ______________________________________________ > Visit the Archives at > http://www.meteoritecentral.com/mailing-list-archives.html > Meteorite-list mailing list > Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com > http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list Received on Wed 01 Dec 2010 04:21:37 PM PST |
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