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"Of course when you combine that with Midsummer snow in Australia and unusually cold weather in many other areas, you start to get a global cooling."

No, the plural of anecdote is not data.

According to NASA November 2010 was the warmest November on record

From the link - The cold anomaly in Northern Europe in November has continued and strengthened in the first half of December. Combined with the unusual cold winter of 2009-2010 in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, this regional cold spell has caused widespread commentary that global warming has ended. That is hardly the case. On the contrary, globally November 2010 is the warmest November in the GISS record. Figure 2(a) illustrates that there is a good chance that 2010 as a whole will be the warmest year in the GISS analysis. Even if the December global temperature anomaly is unusually cool, 2010 will at least be in a statistical tie with 2005 for the warmest year.

Why is 1951 - 1980 used as a base period?

Why not 1880 - 2009 ?

1951-1980 is the "standard" GISS base period used in all their publications. I don't have a reference handy for the selection criteria, but would guess that before 1951 the data gets a lot more sparse. And since a lot of current work focuses on changes in recent (last ~30 years) climate, you can't go too far beyond 1980 without having your base period overlap with the time-span under investigation. The latter consideration, of course, doesn't really apply if we're just looking at November 2010; I just used it because it was the default.

Turns out it doesn't make much difference, though: using a base period of 1881-2009, the November anomaly looks much the same. And using a base period of 1881-1999 (to avoid overlapping with the last decade), the average annual anomaly for 2000-2010 looks like this -- again, very similar.

Why is 1951 - 1980 used as a base period?

Why not 1880 - 2009 ?

1951-1980 is the "standard" GISS base period used in all their publications. I don't have a reference handy for the selection criteria, but would guess that before 1951 the data gets a lot more sparse. And since a lot of current work focuses on changes in recent (last ~30 years) climate, you can't go too far beyond 1980 without having your base period overlap with the time-span under investigation. The latter consideration, of course, doesn't really apply if we're just looking at November 2010; I just used it because it was the default.

Turns out it doesn't make much difference, though: using a base period of 1881-2009, the November anomaly looks much the same. And using a base period of 1881-1999 (to avoid overlapping with the last decade), the average annual anomaly for 2000-2010 looks like this -- again, very similar.

What temperature slump ?

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

Ignoring the exceptional peak in 1998, every year after 1999 has been exceptionally warm, with 2010 about to break a new record.

The point is that the Arctic ocean is over 50 times the area of Britain, so if Britain is cooler than usual but the Arctic is warmer than usual, that is very much a net warming. Here is a map of global temperature anomalies. You can see that there is a small area of negative anomalies over Britain, and another one over Scandinavia, but there is a MUCH larger and MUCH more intense positive anomaly over the Arctic, Asia, and Siberia. (Note that the map is not an equal-area projection, so be careful when looking at it.)

So in other words, the people crowing about the cold winter in Britain are the ones doing the cherry-picking (although perhaps understandably so, if they are British), because they managed to select one of about 4 or 5 countries with significantly lower temperatures than normal, compared to the many dozens (including all of Asia and Africa) with higher temperatures than normal.

Bull [noaa.gov] shit [noaa.gov]

Yes, you Warmers do certainly like to trot out those pages! I see them every time someone questions the validity of your little cult. You were frothing so much I think you forgot you linked twice there to the same thing - or was it your first lie, pretending you had more sources than you really do. You don't mind being called a liar right? After all you brought up the notion it was proper to do so in debate. I see something you got wrong, therefore the correct term to call it out is "liar".

So since you're leaning so heavily on that one article for data, let's consider what it means.

Did you ever stop to think what those graphs are showing temperatures as being warmer than? They are showing a warming in relation from 1961-1971 on (depending on the graph). Note that's exactly the period when things were getting pretty cold and people were scared about another ice age. (that article is from 1974)

Consider this segment:

when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades

OK, so we're at some kind of local minimum there. And then from there it starts rising again, until it crests over where it was. But that means that saying the lasts years average temperatures is warming so drastically when comparing against this large period of time where we considered it to be much colder, is misleading at best because you have a large period of artificially cool temperatures added into the comparison pool.

Let's take NASA again, a different link, talking about November 2010 being the warmest on record.

Scary stuff! Except now we have veered off what you called a lie, that it has been cooling in recent years. Let's return there. Even this NASA article says:

there is a good chance that 2010 as a whole will be the warmest year in the GISS analysis. Even if the December global temperature anomaly is unusually cool, 2010 will at least be in a statistical tie with 2005

Hey, guess what that implies. It's saying that between 2005 and now, temperatures have been cooler than in 2005.

So it really doesn't seem like he was lying at all now, does it? You just don't want to believe it, because it conflicts with your dogma of a constant and unrelenting rise in temperature that will burn us with earthly hellfire!

As for the "clear warming trend across decades", I find it hard to get excited with such a tiny little window of study, and the new understanding that C02 can only marginally raise temperatures (a revision from five degrees to two degrees). If there's no runaway greenhouse effect, there's not nearly the cause for Alarm you Warmists are trying to instil. And if they were wrong by so huge a margin about how much CO2 would cause temperatures to rise, well then you wonder about other predictions like acidity level and so forth...

If anyone knows anything about sunspots, it's Ken -- http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20070032658_2007033016.pdf.

With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum

Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!

For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.

For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity.

The GISS map generator is a great tool for exploring these variations.

With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum

Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!

For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.

For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity.

The GISS map generator is a great tool for exploring these variations.

With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum

Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!

For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.

For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity.

The GISS map generator is a great tool for exploring these variations.

Nuke it from the ground: It's the only way to be sure.

That probably wouldn't work, unfortunately...

Nuclear weapons don't explode in space. The reason you get a huge explosion, heat, etc. detonating one on Earth is because radiation is soaked up by the atmosphere. If you detonate in space, you just get an intense burst of radiation... Which could still be sufficient to kill people over long distances, and it's possible this would be enough to destroy the satellite - but it's not a sure thing. You're not going to be vaporizing that satellite with a nuclear weapon.

I thought NASA was at one point worried that two different cycles of the sun were going to hit at the same time. I also thought they had been saying that the low cycle was unusually long. Which made them worry about how far it could snap back in the other direction. Kind of like a rubber band or how no tremors for long periods make earthquakes worse because they don't let off that energy and instead store it and suddenly release it.

As long as we don't have a repeat of 1859 then I am ok with whatever happens.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090902-1859-solar-storm.html
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/

Another storm like that in this modern electronic age would be a nightmare.

Or more likely, funky, no lead solder

Yeah and that 90 has recently been lowered as well, we're down to a guesstimated 64: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml

It could snow tomorrow. It could rain tomorrow. The sun was supposed to enter a period of high activity in the past two years and it doesn't appear to be coming around to it anytime soon.
Bogus filler article. One would expect that we would be grazed by a CME and have low latitude aurorae in the near future but this simply states that it could happen.

With regards to statistics that could be either UHI or the fact that we've for the last 2-3 decades been in a warm oceanic cycle (or both, of course). http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/heat-island-sprawl.html

I actually tried to make a long bet with someone who, like you, believe CO2 controls our climate a week ago. I would be making it very public, and I would like "the other side" to be a publically recognizable entity, but my suggestion was for $1500.

Short version: We'd both select _one_ climate model, he one from the CO2-crowd (note - a single one) and I one based on the solar->magnetic->clouds->oceans->atmosphere hypothesis, and in ten years we would see which model had tracked the observations most closely.

(I'd use Bob Tisdale's excellent work on integrating ENSO effects for one part - see http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/11/multidecadal-changes-in-sea-surface_17.html )

Unfortunately it seems he wasn't willing. I'm assuming that's because he knows that, so far, no CO2-based climate model has been successful at predicting anything when verified against observations ;)

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a928051726&fulltext=713240928

(Yes, I'm of the Popperian school of science. Feel free to launch hypothesises but if they have no predictive powers they're falsified)

So, there's no immediacy to global warming, we have time to get it right - rather than wrecking our economy for most likely no reason.

Yes, let's jump to grand conclusions based on a single unproven assumption. Betting all life as we know it against maximizing profits is a perfectly rational course of action.

Uh, no. No one is saying global warming will destroy "all life as we know it". In fact, the alarmists never mention the benefits of global warming for some - it's all about the negatives. Think of Canadian wheat for instance.

At any rate, global power generation could be moving much more rapidly towards less carbon emissions, if it weren't for the irrational fear of nuclear power exhibited by the eco-fringe. Market forces should also prevail as solar power actually becomes competitive with fossil fuels.

There never has been a major crisis, it's been manufactured. Even NASA is beginning to come around.

Note that that study predicts only ~1.7 C warming with CO2 doubling from current levels - and that (as always) presumes no change to solar or volcanic inputs.

Another point often discarded by the alarmists is no matter what Western society does to mitigate CO2, Russia, India, China and the "developing world" will swamp those efforts. China's CO2 output in 2030 could equal the ENTIRE WORLD's output today. The good news is that so far the real world has not reflected the alarmism from the GW proponents computer models. Most /. readers are familiar with the GIGO principle I'm sure.. ;-)

Merry Christmas!

3.3g or so for a loaded F-18C

https://pumas.gsfc.nasa.gov/files/03_23_02_1.pdf

Access to information is what elevates us above cavemen. The net may be full of filth but it's also full of real information, even vital information—on geography, health, science, and even entertainment. The more time I spend in rural areas, the more I am awed by the sad paucity of information available to people who actually would like to learn about the world outside their town. Increasing numbers of critical documents are available online. Broadband affects quality of life and encourages growth of business.

Now, if you'd said "someone might not get his WoW fix, oh noes" I probably would have agreed with you.

This layout of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which occurs about every 175 years, allows a spacecraft on a particular flight path to swing from one planet to the next without the need for large onboard propulsion systems.

source

How exactly do they know that Voyager can no longer detect solar wind? Let me guess, since they turned off the entire scan platform on Voyager 2 and all of Voyager 1 except for the UVS, they haven't gotten that data since the year 2000?

I am not an astrophysicist, so I don't understand the subtelties of this, but it should be noted that NASA press release says the probe has measured a solar wind decline, not that the probe is beyond the solar wind. Specifically, it says the solar wind has 'no outward motion'. The probe's environment is still dominated by the solar wind because it is still in the heliosphere, or, as NASA says, 'Crossing into interstellar space would mean a sudden drop in the density of hot particles and an increase in the density of cold particles.'

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20101213.html

Now hurtling toward interstellar space some 17.4 billion kilometers (10.8 billion miles) from the sun, Voyager 1 has crossed into an area where the velocity of the hot ionized gas, or plasma, emanating directly outward from the sun has slowed to zero. Scientists suspect the solar wind has been turned sideways by the pressure from the interstellar wind in the region between stars.

...

Scientists believe Voyager 1 has not crossed the heliosheath into interstellar space. Crossing into interstellar space would mean a sudden drop in the density of hot particles and an increase in the density of cold particles. Scientists are putting the data into their models of the heliosphere's structure and should be able to better estimate when Voyager 1 will reach interstellar space. Researchers currently estimate Voyager 1 will cross that frontier in about four years.

The total cost of the Voyager mission from May 1972 through the Neptune encounter (including launch vehicles, radioactive power source (RTGs), and DSN tracking support) is 865 million dollars.

and

A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter.

That's $0.001384 per bit. There are 1120 bits in an SMS message. That's about $1.55 per SMS. Not exactly cheap, but then Vodafone don't have coverage beyond Pluto.

Nope. Both Voyager probes are well over a light-day away from earth. Voyager 1 being over 31 light-hours away. So it's more like .0035 ly

Check your sources. It's about 116 AU or 16 light hours away.

What planet?

Mars most likey...

That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.

On the contrary, prior to SpaceX winning the COTS contracts the development of the Falcon 9 was well underway and being developed for other markets besides trying to win government contracts. Simply put, SpaceX built the rocket and then said to the government: "do you want to come along for a ride?"

Folks like ATK and even Boeing and Lockheed-Martin all send out what are called "cost-plus" contracts where they don't even have an engineer look at the proposal until after there is an RFP "out there", and then in turn charge the government for the "cost" of making the vehicle including all engineering costs up front. The Falcon 9 was not built with that business model at all.

Furthermore, because of the structure of the contracts that SpaceX has made with NASA, they still own all of the equipment and merely "lease" it to the government. The Dragon capsule from this flight is property of SpaceX, not NASA.

Compare this flight with the Ares I-X flight that cost nearly the same as the entire development costs of the Falcon/Dragon capsule so far from SpaceX, and the Ares I-X only made a sub-orbital flight. The quoted "$450 million" for this flight did not include the development work on the Ares I project itself, which was between $2-$5 billion.

I'd say that the taxpayers are getting a real bargain for this flight. Even if full funding for the Ares I was still in the federal budget, the first flight with an Orion capsule would still be several years away, and the Ares I was started before SpaceX had even formed as a company. Talk about getting results for money spent.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for manned missions. I'm just pointing out that we can get a lot of science done without manning every mission. Here's the NASA page on moon science.

The rovers have been a wonderful success, and the data they've brought back is invaluable, but realistically, what they've accomplished in YEARS could have been done by a human on the ground in a day or two max.

It takes more than a day or two to return from Mars. AND, the rover mission was scheduled to last six months. A six month manned mission to another body couldn't have been extended like that.

There IS science that says, "Even if we stop 100% of all greenhouse emissions right now, it will continue on for at least 50 years."

That science is from NASA.
Climate Change Q&A

1. Regardless of whether you like the term climate change or not, and whether or not your paranoia is justified, climate change is still not a slogan.

2. 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record. I'm not sure how this plays into your claim that temperatures are falling. In fact, as I understand it, the 10 hottest years on record are (in order): 2010*, 1998, 2005, 2009, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2001. That list doesn't look much like "temperatures are falling". In fact, NASA is predicting that 2012 will likely displace 2010 as the hottest year on record.

3. Carbon taxes would not allow the skimming of profits to private funds and banking cartels. As a "tax" it would be going to governments. Cap and trade, on the other hand, would most definitely result in profit form private enterprises. In fact, I dare say, the whole idea of cap and trade is based on the idea that is better from private industry to profit than for the government to profit from the production of CO2.

4. We should be skeptical of all claims, not just those of people we disagree with. Many of your views, in particular, seem to be wildly out of sync with reality. A little more healthy skepticism of the people who you agree with might help you back to some views grounded in reality.

5. This is a perfect example of why debate has to eventually end. If you dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as a fraud or con artist then there can only ever be one satisfactory end to a debate. Now imagine there is at least one person who thinks the same way as you on the other side. The debate is now eternal, regardless of the merits of the arguments.

6. You might like to look at some the temperature graphs. The line is still trending upwards. It's true that 1998 and 2005 were the top 2 warmest years on record. However, the average global temperature for 2009 was virtually the same as the temperature of 2005. We expect to see warming and cooling cycles related to El nino and El nina effects. The next year that is likely to experience similar conditions to 1998 is expected to be 2012.

Yes, weather events do kill people every year, however, climate change is making many natural disasters worse and the greatest threats aren't from freak weather conditions but from changes systematic changes in agricultural areas. If once fertile areas are rendered minimally fertile due to repeated flooding, droughts, and pest migrations, it will likely take years (at best) to replace them. War and famine triggered by climate change represent the biggest threats from climate change. It is in our best interest to carefully consider what the consequences of each action is, including the consequences of inaction.

* As 2010 is not yet done, in theory there still remains a chance that it will be the second or third warmest year on record.

"most technologically advanced" - err, by what standard? It doesn't even appear to have legs or be able to walk.

Um, what use would legs or the ability to walk be for a robot that is built for use the International Space Station, a facility that has neither gravity nor a planetary surface to walk on?

In any case, there are versions of Robonaut with planetary-surface mobility-- take a look at the Robonaut site; there's one on the front page: http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/

It appears to be decades behind the stuff coming out of Japan.

Which space-qualified zero-gravity robot from Japan dating to "decades" back might you be referring to?

One presumes that you meant to say General Motors' (or General Motors's if you prefer) NASA Robot On Tour.

So, Robonaut is now credited to General Motors, and Robert Ambrose and the Robonaut
group at NASA Johnson Space Center don't even get a shout out anymore?

Maybe a link to their 2000 IEEE Intelligent Systems article?

Update, it looks like NASA is planning a press conference around 3:30 PM EST, or 12:30 PST, or 20:30 GMT, for anyone interested in tuning in. The conference is supposed to broadcast on NASA's public and media channels on NASA TV. I think you can tune in here, but am not certain how it works since I can't access video from work.

Also, the Dragon capsule seems to have splashdowned on target in the pacific ocean. Recovery teams are currently working on snagging the capsule as well as recovering the first stage engine over in the Atlantic.

Great idea! Let's kill off funding to the only United States organization doing research outside of low earth orbit! It's not like they've ever done, or are currently doing, anything interesting or useful!

Damn, stupid AC's.

video = http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse/2010/12/06/ahead_20101206_cor2_512.mpg

Since nobody is apparently willing or able to be helpful here I'll go myself. If you're trying to play this on Debian with Iceweasel and you, like me, are being sabotaged by the NASA website's extra-dumb client detection scripts this may work for you as well.

1) Download the asx file:
$ wget http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx

2) Find the playlist file link inside the text file then wget it:
$ wget http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1369080&segment=149773

3) Play the resulting file directly with vlc:
$ vlc makeplaylist.dll\?id\=1369080

This worked for me. I hope it helps someone else, but really NASA should fix their shit.

Actually, they DID discover a new life form. They didn't actually coax an existing bacteria to "use phosphorus". Instead, they discovered an existing organism that can use arsenic in its DNA and RNA rather than the phorphorus other life on earth uses.

Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur are the six basic building blocks of all known forms of life on Earth. Phosphorus is part of the chemical backbone of DNA and RNA, the structures that carry genetic instructions for life, and is considered an essential element for all living cells.

Phosphorus is a central component of the energy-carrying molecule in all cells (adenosine triphosphate) and also the phospholipids that form all cell membranes. Arsenic, which is chemically similar to phosphorus, is poisonous for most life on Earth. Arsenic disrupts metabolic pathways because chemically it behaves similarly to phosphate.

The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells.

The key issue the researchers investigated was when the microbe was grown on arsenic did the arsenic actually became incorporated into the organisms' vital biochemical machinery, such as DNA, proteins and the cell membranes. A variety of sophisticated laboratory techniques was used to determine where the arsenic was incorporated.

Last month, NASA hosted an online astrobiology conference:
http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/nai/ool-www/program/

The conference seminars are now available for viewing.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon's seminar is on day 2:
Alternative Biochemistry and Arsenic, or Life as We Might Not Expect It

First of all, exaggerate much? Where was this "few weeks" of "rampant speculation"? The first I knew of this was NASA announcing 3 days ago that there would be a conference:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html

Besides that, come on....here is this young scientist at the very start of her career (she received her PhD in 2006) and she makes what is (in the scientific community) a pretty earth shattering discovery. Did you watch the video on NASA? I did...this lady is full of excitement, giddy at her discovery. This is A HUGE DEAL for her. This is going to affect her entire career. Let her enjoy her big moment here with a press conference.

My thoughts are as follows:

THIS IS BLOODY AMAZING! followed by a little more tempered cogitation:

Arsenate is a triprotic species just like phosphate, each has a valence of +5, and it's directly one period down on the table so available electron shells in ground state will appear very similar. However arsenic possesses filled d orbitals and is about 7% less electronegative than phosphorous - these factors, among others, tend to make arsenate a little more reactive than phosphate which would make it less stable as a backbone of DNA. So if the degree of replacement is as thorough as NASA claims (they said they cultured it with zero phosphorous present - so only trace impurities) the cell has either found a way to strengthen the backbone or has developed an amazing repair mechanism which can deal with frequent DNA damage.

NASA has two summaries here and here.

Astrobiology has an article here.

And http://www.sciencemag.org/">Science will release a paper later today.

My thoughts are as follows:

THIS IS BLOODY AMAZING! followed by a little more tempered cogitation:

Arsenate is a triprotic species just like phosphate, each has a valence of +5, and it's directly one period down on the table so available electron shells in ground state will appear very similar. However arsenic possesses filled d orbitals and is about 7% less electronegative than phosphorous - these factors, among others, tend to make arsenate a little more reactive than phosphate which would make it less stable as a backbone of DNA. So if the degree of replacement is as thorough as NASA claims (they said they cultured it with zero phosphorous present - so only trace impurities) the cell has either found a way to strengthen the backbone or has developed an amazing repair mechanism which can deal with frequent DNA damage.

NASA has two summaries here and here.

Astrobiology has an article here.

And http://www.sciencemag.org/">Science will release a paper later today.

There was an explanation at the start which suggested that it was accidentally incorporated into a normal cell at first when there wasn't enough phosphorus around and that since then the cells found a way to handle the weaker bonds it would give, so the current idea seems to be a "standard" organism adjusting to life with arsenic on Earth.

How the arsenic DNA affects the life form is up for grabs at the minute. There is a NASA article here which has images of the cells grown on both phosphorus and arsenic so it seems happy enough to use either. It'll probably need some coping-mechanisms to deal with the toxicity and weaker bonds of arsenic that were mentioned by the biochemist during the show. A few things that were said in the release imply that it's perfectly capable of using both at the same time, which could be interesting. Bacteria often accumlulate polyphosphate chains for all sorts of regulatory and energy functions. It'll be neat to see if this could use polyarsenate or even a polyphosphate/arsenate mix.

Or, Yahoo did. Besides being listed as a sponsor on the NASA TV page, if one looks at the Windows Media link (for instance) and examines the ASX file, one notes a reference to "http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1369080&segment=149773". See for yourself (probably using wget).

Or, Yahoo did. Besides being listed as a sponsor on the NASA TV page, if one looks at the Windows Media link (for instance) and examines the ASX file, one notes a reference to "http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1369080&segment=149773". See for yourself (probably using wget).

"...her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today."

Not really, the structure is still most the same, except phosphorus is very likely swapped out for arsenic. They don't have a direct proof that phosphorus is used in DNA yet, but it's very likely. It has been a theoretical possibiltiy, and now they very likely have found the example.

"...this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology."

Err.... no, it changes some concepts, but a lot of what we know about biology is still the same. Eating arsenic is still going to kill people.

I am not disputing the importance of this finding, but as NASA scientist said, it expands what we know about biology, rather than "change(s) everything we know".

Why not just link to NASA? http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

Even NY Times has a better write up: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/science/03arsenic.html?src=mv&pagewanted=all

There has been quite a bit of discussion here, on the possibility of this being a completely new type of life (no common ancestor with other life). That would have been mind-boggling amazing indeed - but from what I read, it sounded much more likely that what they found where an more or less ordinary microbe that have substituted phosphorous the chemically similar arsenic (and still have the same nucleic acids, base-pairing, ribosome, protein synthesis etc).

Looking at the press release from Nasa, this is indeed the case:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells.

It's still amazingly cool, but life as we know it is not falling apart =)

::facepalm::

If what's being reported is accurate, they've discovered a life form whose DNA was previously thought to be completely, unequivocally, no-exceptions impossible. Not just "we haven't found it", but impossible.

From the NASA article, according to Carl Pilcher, this was already thought possible: "Until now a life form using arsenic as a building block was only theoretical, but now we know such life exists in Mono Lake."

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

The NASA press release specifies "EST". http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html

Exactly. If you look at NASA's announcement of the press conference, the headline is "NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2" (emphasis mine).

It's not a NASA embargo, it's a Science Journal embargo.

One of the core goals of NASA is to discover more about the universe in which we live and how it impacts us. Obviously the search for extraterrestrial life is part of that mission, but if we assume all life (and the planets harbouring them) are identical to our systems then we're going to ignore avenues that might be evident or even more prevalent.
What was a patent clerk doing contemplating the nature of space/time?