Thursday, December 02, 2010

NASA Discovers Alien Life In California?

Here's the rumor today, NASA Discovers Alien Life In California

"Today NASA will hold a press conference revealing to the world the discovery of a form of life unlike any other on Earth. What twisted alien landscape gave birth to such a life form? Try California.

Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California has been plumbing the depths Mono Lake for quite some time. The alkaline and hypersaline lake, located in California's Mono County, is one of the world's most naturally concentrated sources of arsenic. Arsenic is highly poisonous to most forms of multi-cellular life, but Wolfe-Simon believed that life could exist in the lake; just not life as we know it."

"Phosphorus, along with hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, make up the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it. Wolfe-Simon has discovered a bacteria that swaps out phosphorus with arsenic. The discovery that a life form can be comprised of something other than the six fundamental building blocks of life changes everything."

We'll apparently see if this is true at 2pm.

3 comments:

kim said...

Apparently the real deal. Cool. See http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

Howard said...

Yeah it's cool enough to already be spoofed on xkcd: http://xkcd.com/829/

kim said...

Wow they're fast. One of the stick figures even looks like Felisa Wolfe-Simon.