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Astrobiology research funded by NASA has made a tremendous new discovery which could "fundamentally change the knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth," according to NASA. (Scroll down for live video and updates.)The major finding announced today has fueled speculation recently that reached a fever pitch after the agency said the finding "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life."While the discovery is not extraterrestrial life, NASA has indeed uncovered an entirely new life form on our planet that "doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living" on Earth, The New York Daily News reports.Code: [Select] In a bombshell that upends long-held assumptions about the basic building blocks of life, scientists have discovered a a whole new type of creature: a microbe that lives on arsenic. It is unlike every other lifeform on the planet - from the simplest plant to the most complex mammal.
In a bombshell that upends long-held assumptions about the basic building blocks of life, scientists have discovered a a whole new type of creature: a microbe that lives on arsenic. It is unlike every other lifeform on the planet - from the simplest plant to the most complex mammal.
Three species of creature, which are only a millimetre long and resemble jellyfish encased in shells, were found 2.2 miles (3.5km) underwater on the ocean floor, 124 miles (200km) off the coast of Crete, in an area with almost no oxygen.The animals, named Loriciferans due to their protective layer, or lorica, were discovered by a team led by Roberto Danovaro from Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy.One of the species has been named Spinoloricus Cinzia, after Dr Danovaro's wife, while the other two, known as Rugiloricus and Pliciloricus, have yet to be formally named.They were found during three expeditions to find life in the sediment of L'Atlante basin in the Mediterranean, which took place over the course of a decade.Professor Danovaro told BBC News bodies of multicellular animals had been found in sediment from a similarly oxygen-starved area of the Black Sea, but they were thought to have been carried there from adjacent oxygenated water.The species found in the latest expedition were alive, two of them containing eggs, and though they died on extraction the eggs were successfully incubated on the ship, and hatched in an oxygen-starved environment.The professor said: "It is a real mystery how these creatures are able to live without oxygen because until now we thought only bacteria could do this."Lisa Levin, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote in the journal BMC Biology that further research into animals that can live without oxygen could help scientists examining the possibility of alien life existing on other planets.
Life will find a way. Truly amazing discoveries both!
No, you posted (1) an article about a bacteria that lives in arsenic and (2) another article about a Lociferan (the jellyfish looking thing) that lives in an environment with extremely poor oxygen. These are two separate discoveries about two very different organisms.
Quote from: aozeba on December 07, 2010, 01:41:54 PMNo, you posted (1) an article about a bacteria that lives in arsenic and (2) another article about a Lociferan (the jellyfish looking thing) that lives in an environment with extremely poor oxygen. These are two separate discoveries about two very different organisms.O lol - your right! I was writing an article about those jelyfish-like organism earlier on biology forum. I must have accidenty posted it here. Thx for noticing
