NASA finds new form of life... on Earth

Quote

Bacteria that thrive on arsenic have been scooped from a California lake, a discovery that redefines the building blocks of life and offers new hope in the search for other organisms on Earth and beyond.

Full story here....


Posted December 03, 2010, 18:37:52 PM	Logged

MoonStruckGames - Lovecraftian Games

Data

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Re: NASA finds new form of life... on Earth

Interesting story, I read it on the BBC site a couple of days ago, that’s going to change how we search for life on other planets and moons I should think.


Posted December 03, 2010, 20:42:15 PM	Logged

Snowcrash

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Re: NASA finds new form of life... on Earth

As a living being I am happy I can recognise other living things.

As soon as you define life you will find something that breaks that definition. It happens again.

I caught this story on radio 1. Interesting.


Posted December 04, 2010, 11:03:57 AM	Logged

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

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Carl2

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Re: NASA finds new form of life... on Earth

I believe I saw or read that somewhere, I'd heard from some where that a virus will not meet all the requirements of our definition of life. Just looked in Wikipedia at virus but although interesting didn't help me on what I was looking for.
Carl2


Posted December 04, 2010, 14:38:45 PM	Logged

Snowcrash

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Re: NASA finds new form of life... on Earth

As far as I'm concerned (my opinion matters to me) virus' are alive. If not a pain in the butt.
The more we find about them the more we realise how much they've steered evolution. Most life has copies of virus' DNA in it's genome.
The reason they are sometimes not classed as life is due to they cannot replicate on their own. They hijack other cells replication machinery, the definition of a virus.
So, by that definition, the life NASA has found is not life due to it doesn't use the 6 'must' elements of life that even virus' use.
Life is complex and is not the problem. The problem is the definition.


Posted December 05, 2010, 11:31:54 AM	Logged

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Carl2

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Re: NASA finds new form of life... on Earth

What I was looking for was something which stated that a virus was capable of traveling through space. I believe I'd heard that a virus would go into a dormant state but is capable of surviving space travel.
Wikipedia says there are forms of viruses that provide useful functions. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it lends further credence to the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.[1] "
Carl2