Arsenic-loving Microbes Alter the Search for Life

摘要

A team of NASA-funded researchers discovered a micro-organism in the harsh environment of California's Mono Lake able to thrive on arsenic, a startling finding that NASA said Dec. 2 will force scientists to rewrite biology textbooks and expand the scope of the search for life beyond Earth.rn"The definition of life has just expanded," NASA's associate administrator for science, Edward Weiler, said during a press conference at the agency's headquarters here to announce the findings. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."