Weird-Assed Bacteria Found that Lives on Arsenic

Now this might turn out to be one of the great finds this century.

In a surprising revelation, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today, working differently than the rest of the organisms in the planet. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks.

This creature actually lives off of an element that kills just about everything on this planet. What this discovery means is that the number of alien planets just jumped 10 fold. So life doesn't just need to 6 essential elements in order to survive. All they might need is one element which isn't even carbon based (in this case a poisonous element) to do all the work in order to survive. The idea of a bacteria that uses arsenic as building blocks is pretty nuts by itself. Of course some geek at NASA sums it up perfectly using Trek:

NASA's geobiologist Pamela Conrad thinks that the discovery is huge and "phenomenal," comparing it to the Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew finds Horta, a silicon-based alien life form that can't be detected with tricorders because it wasn't carbon-based.

I remember reading a book called Our Universe when I was a kid that speculated about life on other planets. One of the creatures was this blue silicate creature living on Pluto that jumped high into the air skirting the planetoids weak gravity. I'm not sure why it jumped it might have been just for fun. With the find of this GFAJ-1 bacteria such lifeforms might now be technically possible.