I love NASA. Well, not exactly- I both love and hate NASA all at the same time. They seem to suffer from a stunning lack of ambition in these sad days of space travel we live in, but occasionally, every so often they still show that they have the power to make me sit up and say 'Cool.'
Today was one such occasion: it started with a sexy tease to the media about a big announcement. CNN, still recovering from the shocking double win of the World Cup for Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022) respectively, seized on this and spent many hours speculating about whether or not this life might be alien.
It wasn't. Well, it was. Kind of, but not really… basically, what NASA had found was a bacteria that broke the rules of what we know about biology on planet Earth. All life as we know it, the article says, is made up of six main building blocks: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. This little guy swapped out the phosphorus for the usually toxic arsenic and thrived so much on it that arsenic was actually integrated into its DNA.
Science geeks everywhere are probably jumping up and down about this- and even I, not being science inclined in any way, shape or form had to admit it was pretty damn cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment