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That's their natural environment, yeah; too bad NASAs weren't grown there. Joel Send a noteboard - 10/12/2010 05:42:59 PM
Don't these things live in a lake or something? Arsenic esters would be a lot weaker than phosphate esters but NTPs are pretty stable against hydrolysis due to high activation energy. It might just be a chemistry issue... we'll see.

That said, the skeptic inside me thinks this could just be a NASA scheme with the US budget going to be up for debate again.

That's the problem; the closer we look at this the more reason there is to think it was a publicity stunt gone horribly wrong than legitimate science. They so heavily implied they'd found ET while carefully avoiding actually saying so that even in the first thread on it here people were essentially saying, "It's probably NOT an actual ET, they're just hyping a less dramatic discovery that way to get attention". Then we find out that it's a terrestrial organism that simply CAN, under the right conditions, replace phosphorus with arsenic in its DNA. Then we find out that it didn't even do that in its natural environment, but in a petri dish where biologists heavily encouraged it to do so. Now there are allegations the cited DNA data can't even exist. Well, they wanted publicity.... :P
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NASA flubbed up! - 09/12/2010 05:52:24 AM 890 Views
Yeah, I don't really understand - 09/12/2010 07:16:01 AM 579 Views
That's their natural environment, yeah; too bad NASAs weren't grown there. - 10/12/2010 05:42:59 PM 540 Views
Arsenic is an element. It can't break down in water. - 09/12/2010 09:22:22 AM 480 Views
Yeah....it washes off - 09/12/2010 04:03:40 PM 476 Views
this doesn't quite sound like a "flub" - 09/12/2010 04:41:27 PM 447 Views
I hope the original study proves correct. - 10/12/2010 10:36:43 PM 456 Views

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