Curiosity Grows as NASA Sets Extraterrestrial Search Update

Finally the truth will be told. Seriously with modern day technology why can't we go back to have a live feedback on hd ?
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He's already on it.

 

Apparently its about some form of bacteria who's DNA is made of arsenic that they found in a lake in California and not an ET.

 

Damn it, so it's alien life, not extraterrestrial? Lame.

 

Lame? Are people that r****ded? This is an amazing news. What is means the possibility that intelligent life doesn't have to have an earth like environment to harbor life. It also mean the possibility of a super alien race and an alien right out of the movie Aliens with acid blood and all that crazy stuff right out of Sci-Fi. Yes, there also might be the possibility of a Pegasus or a unicorn like on other planets.

 

Nothing to see here guys.

Sorry, no aliens. Just bacteria munching on poison.

 

it's not munching on poison, it IS poison

 

Yes, it is much more interesting - we have been searching for life thinking it must have the same building blocks as life here on earth.

Life can sprout freaking anywhere. All those planets......

 

NASA is really fighting for it's life lately with spending cuts and the growing private space sector. Looking outside of the box may be a good thing. Anticlimactic news conferences aren't.

 

What happened with the Water in the Moon Stuff?
we going to get some of that moon water or what?

Rocket River

 

Moon water will be the next Fiji Water.

 

"This Paper Should Not Have Been Published"
Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.
By Carl Zimmer
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2010, at 10:53 AM ET
....

As soon Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. "I was outraged at how bad the science was," she told me.

Redfield blogged a scathing attack on Saturday. Over the weekend, a few other scientists took to the Internet as well. Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. "It would be really cool if such a bug existed," said San Diego State University's Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, "none of the arguments are very convincing on their own." That was about as positive as the critics could get. "This paper should not have been published," said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.

None of the scientists I spoke to ruled out the possibility that such weird bacteria might exist. Indeed, some of them were co-authors of a 2007 report for the National Academies of Sciences on alien life that called for research into, among other things, arsenic-based biology. But almost to a person, they felt that the NASA team had failed to take some basic precautions to avoid misleading results.

When the NASA scientists took the DNA out of the bacteria, for example, they ought to have taken extra steps to wash away any other kinds of molecules. Without these precautions, arsenic could have simply glommed to the DNA, like gum on a shoe. "It is pretty trivial to do a much better job," said Rohwer.

In fact, says Harvard microbiologist Alex Bradley, the NASA scientists unknowingly demonstrated the flaws in their own experiment. They immersed the DNA in water as they analyzed it, he points out. Arsenic compounds fall apart quickly in water, so if it really was in the microbe's genes, it should have broken into fragments, Bradley wrote Sunday in a guest post on the blog We, Beasties. But the DNA remained in large chunks—presumably because it was made of durable phosphate. Bradley got his Ph.D. under MIT professor Roger Summons, a professor at MIT who co-authored the 2007 weird-life report. Summons backs his former student's critique.

But how could the bacteria be using phosphate when they weren't getting any in the lab? That was the point of the experiment, after all. It turns out the NASA scientists were feeding the bacteria salts which they freely admit were contaminated with a tiny amount of phosphate. It's possible, the critics argue, that the bacteria eked out a living on that scarce supply. As Bradley notes, the Sargasso Sea supports plenty of microbes while containing 300 times less phosphate than was present in the lab cultures.

"Low levels of phosphate in growth media, naive investigators and bad reviewers are the stories here," said Norman Pace of the University of Colorado, a pioneer of identifying exotic microbes by analyzing their DNA, who was another co-author on the weird-life report.
...

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2276919

 

Death knell for NASA?