NASA-funded scientific research has just blown us away, by changing the way we look at life on Earth.

Scientists who were researching and testing the harsh environments of Mono Lake in California have uncovered the first organism on the planet which can reproduce and thrive in arsenic – a deadly poison. The organism actually uses arsenic in place of phosphorous in the cell components.

“The definition of life has just expanded,” commented NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington, Ed Weiler. “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.”

This has turned everything we have known on its head. Science textbooks will need to be changed, and we will need to readjust our point of view when it comes to looking for extra terrestrial life in the universe. The findings of the study were published in this week’s edition of Science Express.

Now, an organism which lives in arsenic is one thing, but this little guy actually is made out of it!

“We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new — building parts of itself out of arsenic,” explains a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and the research team’s lead scientist, Felisa Wolfe-Simon. “If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?”

Yes, we will now need to go over all the old data for the moon.. It’s possible we missed something..
This new data means a whole lot more work, but a whole lot more excitement is around the bend as well.