The most interesting news of the day won’t be aired on C-SPAN. It’s not the Democrats’ tax-acrobatics, or John Boehner’s ‘chicken crap‘ comment. It’s not the continued and bizarre resistance of Arizona Senator, John McCain, to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – in spite of a majority of both parties and most Americans and most troops who think repeal is the right move, or at the very least a move that won’t harm anyone. Nor is it revelations that the Federal Reserve is looking at changing the rules of the game to make it much easier for banks to foreclose on homeowners, dubious proceedings be damned. After all, we all know whose side the Fed is on, and it’s not the average American. (Hint: it’s the bankers!)
No, the most interesting news of the day is the discovery of new – and seemingly alien – life on Earth by scientists at NASA:
Arsenic is toxic and is thought to be too chemically unstable to do the work of phosphorus, which includes tasks such as holding DNA in a tidy double helix, activating proteins and getting passed around to provide energy in cells. If the new results are validated, they have huge implications for basic biochemistry and the origin and evolution of life, both on Earth and elsewhere in the universe.
Microbes are known to breathe arsenic, but actually changing the fundamental building blocks is new:
The new microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, NASA said in a statement. Researchers first tried growing microbes from the lake with little phosphorous but generous amounts of arsenic. When this worked, the researchers then removed the phosphorous entirely; the microbes continued to grow. Additional analysis showed that the microbes were using the arsenic to produce building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells—and became incorporated directly into the organisms’ biochemical machinery, such as its DNA, proteins, and cell membranes.
The discovery has a number of implications, not the least of which is our understanding of how to search for extraterrestrial life in the universe. And, as it happens, this discovery coincides nicely with the revelation that there are up to three times more red dwarf stars in the universe than previously believed to exist:
Combine these innumberable stars and their planets with our new discovery that the building blocks of life might be far more complex than we have long-believed, and you begin to quickly realize how limitless the possibilities of life beyond our little blue planet really have become.
Two phrases come to mind: ‘The Truth is Out There’ and ‘I Want to Believe’. And indeed, these days it seems science-fiction is closing rapidly on our heels.
Whether we’ll actually come into contact with life out there in the starry black skies is a question nobody can answer, but in a way, these arsenic-based microbes here on earth are every bit as alien as anything we’ve encountered before.
