Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.

but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—

Do you not understand how this could impact our search for life on other planets?

An important, and unintentional, consequence of ending the water diversions was the onset of a period of "meromixis" in Mono Lake.[10] In the time prior to this, Mono Lake was typically "monomictic"; which means that at least once each year the deeper waters and the shallower waters of the lake mixed thoroughly, thus bringing oxygen and other nutrients to the deep waters. In meromictic lakes, the deeper waters do not undergo this mixing; the deeper layers are more saline than the water near the surface, and are typically nearly devoid of oxygen. As a result, becoming meromictic greatly changes a lake's ecology.

Arsenic-bacteria have implications for possible extra-terrestrial life, too. "If life started in more than one manner on our planet, it would be very peculiar to believe that other places in the universe are not teeming with it," says Davies.

The point is that what we thought were the six essential building blocks of life are not what they seemed.

"The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic."

"uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks"

So, given enough time to evolve.....







Actually, I do find it interesting and exciting. Scientists have speculated about life forms that could exist in environments that would be toxic to any carbon-based life form (you should see some of the ideas they had for theoretical life on Jupiter), but this certainly proves that life can exist beyond what we thought was possible.

still holding out for silicon based life

Is this because they're in the same group and have a reasonably close e-negativity to each other?

thats Silicone lol