10 replies to this topic

[Dave]

arsenic

Arsenic-based life form discovered...on Earth. (No, it's not Kathy Lee Gifford.) Not sure what Mono has been doing in Mono Lake, but he may be a proud pappa.

snippet:
a bacterium is able to use the deadly poison arsenic in place of an element previously considered essential for life. The finding appears to expand the range of places where life could exist — both on Earth and elsewhere in the universe.

NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon says she was fascinated by crustaceans because they don't use iron to carry oxygen around their bodies the way most species do. Instead, they use copper.

Wolfe-Simon thought this sort of chemical substitution might go even further.

"What about the main building blocks of life? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur — can we substitute any of those? And the dogma is no," she said.

The arsenic-rich environment she picked was Mono Lake in California. It's a very odd lake: very salty and full of arsenic. Yet it's teeming with life, including many microscopic organisms in the muddy lake bed.

"This is a phenomenal finding," said Mary Voytek, who directs the agency's astrobiology program. "We are talking about taking the fundamental building blocks of life and replacing one of them with another compound."

[monogodo]

One of my all-time favorite sci-fi authors, Jack Chalker (who I just discovered died in 2005, damnit), wrote multiple series about life forms that were based on things not considered to be the norm, such as arsenic-based. If you're interested, it's the Well World series.

And trust me, you don't want to have anything to do with any life form that lives off what comes out of my body.

[Dave]

I don't think I want anything that lives off of what comes out of his body either.

The man must sweat lard.

[monogodo]

Dave, on 04 December 2010 - 11:56 PM, said:

I don't think I want anything that lives off of what comes out of his body either.

The man must have sweat lard.

There, fixed it for you (he's dead, y'know).

[Dave]

Present tense. Even in death, his sweat glands are pumping out globules of pork fat. His body will be immaculately preserved for future archaeologists who will marvel at the strange burial ceremony that swathed this man's body in a bacon death shroud.

I can only hope for an equally awesome funeral.

[monogodo]

I'm guessing that even after cremation, they still have that power?

Quote

Some of his remains are interred in the family plot at Loudon Park Cemetery, with the remainder distributed afterwards off a ferry near Hong Kong, a final ride on White's Ferry on Father's Day 2007, and on H. P. Lovecraft's grave.

Unless, of course, they simply dismembered him and distributed the parts whole. Which would have been even more awesome.

[monogodo]

This web comic is appropriate for me to share here.



You also really should click through to the actual site, as there's a funny mouseover, ala XKCD.

On a side note, the artist who draws Hijinks Ensue was one of the two guys who videotaped my wedding. Cynthia and I have been reading the comic since February or March, and it was only this past September or so that we realized that the Joel Watson that does the comic is the Joel Watson who we know.

[Dave]

And your DJ became Fatboy Slim?

Also, oops. Maybe not so much with the arsenic life. "outraged at how bad the science was," said a scientist. "This paper should not have been published," said another. '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. ...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.'

[monogodo]

Yeah, I saw the articles about the problems with the arsenic paper.

And no, our DJ did not become Fatboy Slim. We were the DJ. We burned music to a few CDs and put them in the Bed & Breakfast's CD changer.

[Dave]

That's why I could never understand why DJs get paid so much. I know, I know, "feel of the room" and all that stuff, but I still think 98% of them are glorified human jukeboxes.

[monogodo]

At my 20-year HS reunion, they hired the father of one of our classmates to be the DJ.

If you were going to DJ the Class of 1986 reunion, wouldn't you tend to play songs from the 80s? I know I would. Not this guy. He played modern country hits. Hardly any of us like(d) country. And he played it too loud. We couldn't converse with our friends and get caught up on what happened in the last 5 years of our lives. Every time we'd ask him to turn it down, he would for a song or two, but then would crank it in an attempt to get people to dance. It was horrible.