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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
 Posted - 12/07/2010 : 15:02:38 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by On fire for Christ
NASA jump the gun again
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Maybe. I am withholding judgment. In any case, as filthy points out, it's still a very interesting discovery in terms of what life can do to survive. These extremophiles are interesting just because they exist. |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 12/07/2010 : 18:15:33 [Permalink]
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I love extremophiles! Little can be more amazing than a creature that can thrive in such things as sulphuric acid and carve rocks while doing it. Along that same line, the bacteria in our guts might be considered extremophile. There is a worm that lives in Arctic ice and the inhabitants of the Black Smokers, ranging from bacteria to tube worms and crabs, extremophiles all, have yet to be catalogued entirely. Indeed, life on this very Earth began with extremophiles.
This little bug is quite remarkable, but not all that big a deal, relatively speaking. Mostly, it shows just how far adaptation and ultimatly evolution will go to "save the baby," as it were.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 12/08/2010 : 05:22:59 [Permalink]
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Oh dear: 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
On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie sat down to read a new paper called, "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.
Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand. On Monday, NASA released a Sphinxlike press release: "NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." Like a virulent strain of bacteria, speculation exploded over the next three days. "Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn's Moons?" asked Gawker, a Web site that does not often ask questions about astrobiology.
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Evidently, what we have here is sloppy science that is now being viciously picked apart in a remarkably public peer review. That's the way science works, and is as it should be. That is the main lesson we take away from this.
Read on to see just how sloppy it was.
So whereaway now for our odd, little bug? Possibly, even probably, there is something there that is worth studying, but the study must be conducted in an orderly and scholarly manner. And NASA must learn not to do science by press release.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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| Edited by - filthy on 12/08/2010 05:25:59 |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 12/08/2010 : 10:38:39 [Permalink]
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| Sorry to break this to you filthy, but you have linked to the same article that I did on the previous page... |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 12/08/2010 : 12:13:55 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Kil
Sorry to break this to you filthy, but you have linked to the same article that I did on the previous page...
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D'oh! I see that I did -- how did I miss that? Senile dementia creeps ever closer, ever closer. Also the DTs. 
Apologies to all.
To at least partially redeem myself, I give you this interesting and loosely related bit of interest:
Astronomers: Life elsewhere seems even more likely, but may be more like slime mold than ET
Lately, a handful of new discoveries make it seem more likely that we are not alone — that there is life somewhere else in the universe.
In the past several days, scientists have reported there are three times as many stars as they previously thought. Another group of researchers discovered a microbe can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest environments. And earlier this year, astronomers for the first time said they'd found a potentially habitable planet.
"The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger," said Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, which studies the origins, evolution and possibilities of life in the universe. "I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, 'There's got to be life out there.'"
A caveat: Since much of this research is new, scientists are still debating how solid the conclusions are.
Another reason to not get too excited is that the search for life starts small — microscopically small — and then looks to evolution for more. The first signs of life elsewhere are more likely to be closer to slime mold than to ET. It can evolve from there.
Scientists have an equation that calculates the odds of civilized life on another planet. But much of it includes factors that are pure guesswork on less-than-astronomical factors, such as the likelihood of the evolution of intelligence and how long civilizations last. Stripped to its simplistic core — with the requirement for intelligence and civilization removed — the calculations hinge on two basic factors: How many places out there can support life? And how hard is it for life to take root?
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interesting, no? Yeah, yeah it's interesting....
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 12/09/2010 : 11:58:41 [Permalink]
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I'm not convinced by the "arsenate hydrolyzes rapidly in water" argument (Arsenate in DNA would give the molecule a novel geometry, maybe shielding the arsenate molecules from water), more is needed to say that with any confidence.
But this paper is probably wrong. They failed to consider that phosphate concentrations don't need to be high in order for a microbe to have normal DNA and normal biochemistry.
They didn't run a negative control to see if normal bacteria grown in high level of arsenate produced the same result on analysis of the purified DNA. If the normal bacteria in a high arsenate environment did not have arsenate associated with DNA then they would have a nice bit of supporting evidence for their claim.
I read that NASA is going to make samples of the bacteria available to researchers, so it may not be long before this paper is confirmed or shot down in flames.
Also, the name given the microbe (GFAJ-1). It is short for "Get(or give) Felisa A Job" Felisa being the first name of the primary author. Personally I find this kind of naming very annoying. There isn't (yet) a standardized naming convention for microbes, genes, proteins, and all that, but... in microbiology the names are traditionally descriptive and help place the organism in the phylogenetic tree. (genes and proteins are worse... forkhead, hedgehod, INDY- I'm Not Dead Yet...) This only confuses things, and in a case like this where the scientist is probably very wrong, it is foolish.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Newly Found Arsenic-Based Life Form
