It doesn't appear that they have got to the fun bits yet. Research is pretty much at the overview stage. They appear to have some crystallography data that suggests that the arsenic is bound to the DNA which suggests it's replacing the phosphorus backbone, but I don't see anything that shows the critter has replaced ATP (Adenosine TriPhosphate, the cellular power source) with Adenosine TriArsinate.
Of course, one doesn't expect research to just dump everything out at once, there are many years of digging through this to sort it out.
If arsenic is really powering the bacterium, then it's pretty impressive because the thing seems to grow at about 60% of maximum rate in a phosphate depleted source.
Grrrr. This whole thing seems to be a bit hyped. What they've found is a bug that can live in high concentrations of arsenic BUT requires low concentrations of phosphate. They don't describe the molecular biology at all (at least on the Fox news blurb).
They're throwing this out as a pitch to start opening up their exobiology programs to look for other things other than your garden variety life forms. Gee. SF authors have been pitching this for decades and I'm sure that the NASA teams launching the Mars / Titan probes would be perfectly happy to start enlarging the scope of their experiments if maybe, they were given some half decent funding.
I'm not sure this opens the door to the 'shadow biosphere' much. From a mechanistic and energetic viewpoint, it just shows that you can replace one important, reactive element with another (disclaimer - the devil may be in the details, we really don't know much at this stage - not like that is stopping us).
What it appears to do is give us a bit more leeway in describing conditions that carbon based / nucleic acid based life can form and thrive. I would be most surprised if this turns out to be anything but a previously based phosphorus based organism evolving into using arsenic.
They, however, are certainly keeping the fun details close to their vests.
But anyway, Phosphorus is a fairly energetic element (think boom in the appropriate situations). Life needs energy, which at the molecular level is electron flow. ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) is a molecule used buy ALL living life forms (except perhaps the one we shall learn about soon) to transfer electrons and therefore is sort of a biological battery (maybe capacitor is a better analogy) that stores energy for use in the countless chemical reactions involved in life.
Arsenic is close enough chemically to Phosphorus to screw this up, which it's why it is an effective poison. However, since it is chemically quite similar, what evolution has apparently done (and of course, I'm guessing at the moment) is to substitute Arsenic for Phosphorous in the DNA backbone (DNA is made of four "bases" attached to several Phosphorus atoms, the Phosphorus drives a lot of the chemistry that DNA is involved in).
We already know about some little buggers that use arsenic in place of Phosphorus in a few chemical reactions, but nothing apparently this robust. So it's very interesting, but I do not believe that we have to worry about the aliens from Mono lake becoming our new poisonous overlords.
Well, what you found isn't what you think you've found. You ran smack dab into a press release.
The chance of the press release meaningfully representing the actual occurrence are slim. As has been pointed out, this is likely to be a DNA (the usual base pairs that belong to us) based organism who has replace phosphorus with arsenic. If you look at the two on the periodic table, they are chemically similar.
Yes, it's very significant. Yes it's very important, however it really appears to be 'life as we know it'.
For fans of astrobiology, it gives us one additional data point to say the molecular mechanisms of life are robust enough to work in environments that were felt to be inhospitable. It opens up the Drake equation to a degree, but it doesn't answer the Fundamental Question (which is NOT 'when is the pizza arriving').
Except instead of your "hey wouldn't it be totally ironic if anti-bacterial soap made people SICKER!!??" observation, they have identified Triclosan and Bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor with the specific function of inhibiting the immune system not by protecting it from exposure or selectively breeding resistant germs (the two popular "well duh" observations here) but by actually inhibiting the effectiveness of the immune system. Knowing this, as opposed to say "knowing that for sure, antibacterial soaps are totally bad because they don't let your body *learn* about bad germs!!!" is what leads to advances in medicine and pathogen control.
I'm not a doctor but I appreciate what they do.
Let's not get hasty here. They took some data previously collected:
Methods: Using data from the 2003-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we compared urinary bisphenol A (BPA) and triclosan with serum cytomegalovirus antibody levels and diagnosis of allergies or hayfever in US adults and children age 6 years. We used multivariate ordinary least squares linear regression models to examine the association of BPA and triclosan with cytomegalovirus antibody titers, and multivariate logistic regression models to investigate the association of these chemicals with allergy/hayfever diagnosis. Statistical models were stratified by age (
Then ran a series of statistical tests to see if there were any correlations between the body burden of BPA and triclosan and putative proxies for immune function (CMV titer and hayfever diagnosis).
They "adjusted" for a bunch of variables and come out with a correlation between the markers and their effects. They then go on to state that the chemicals may depress immune function.
It may be true but this sort of analysis is prone to a host of problems - poor data collection, poor data analysis, over correlation by the statistical software and god knows what else by the statistical software (disclaimer - I've only read the abstract, I don't know exactly how they did it but unless they have a very good statistician looking over their shoulders, they open to making any one of a number of mistakes).
And of course, our favorite logical fallacy: Correlation implying Causation. Specifically, the charge that the endocrine disruption mechanism of BPA and Triclosan is the cause of the immune changes is not addressed at all. It's simply assumed.
Unfortunately, this is like the vast majority of the literature in these areas. Because good science is so hard to do, we gets lots of these little studies that may or may not mean much of anything. They're fine, it's the way we have to do things, but don't flush all of the soap down the toilet.
Indeed. The problem, as always, is that we need an 'enemy'. Since the Soviet Union did us a disservice my collapsing in the 1990's the powers that be needed to find a convenient one. China? Maybe - but we are locked in an economic menage-a-tois with China, Europe and Japan (OK, that's four). We can snipe at the Chinese, just as one would do with their lover, but dissolving the relationship is going to be really hard.
Terrorists, especially Muslim terrorists, are just absolutely perfect in this regard.
Their religion is just different enough to be offensive, their culture is different enough to be offensive and they do some truly offensive things (think behavior towards women). They're small enough to never really be a threat but large enough to act like one. They have their own bat-shit insane actors (think Kadafi and Ahmadinejad). They dress funny. They talk funny. They don't like alcohol and dogs.
Just the perfect balance between being different and truly dangerous and many of them don't particularly like us.
We have always been at war with Islam (which is actually a pretty accurate statement in a number of ways). Now if they would just develop a credible space program...
But that is not new. Smaller? Yes, but still an incremental upgrade, nothing is new in that product.
Just what are you expecting? Mr. Fusion in your pocket? A portable transporter? A flying car? (OK, we've been expecting that for years).
You all realize that Apple is a consumer hardware company, do you not? They don't make 787's, Space Shuttles or nuclear weapons. The do seem to make computer related consumer gizmos better than any of their competitors? Yeah, it would me neat if they made a mid sized tower, but it doesn't look like. Yeah, the iPad is ridiculously crippled for everyone hear who wants to control their toaster with it. But Apple seems to make stuff people want, hence it's good year. You can argue whether that's "incremental", "insignificant" or even bleh, but I bet Micheal Dell would like some of whatever it is that Jobs is smmoking.
All public photography is illegal in Kuwait, except for licensed journalists. This includes DSLRs, compacts, camera phones, video, everything.
Really?. Kuwait doesn't seem do too well on the enforcement end of things.
Kuwait does not publish its laws, has no freedom of information - legally or culturally - and sees no problem at all with lying about what the law is. Like all police states, Kuwait would rather that everyone be guilty of something. Enforcement is completely arbitrary - visiting businessmen (better believe I mean 'men') taking snaps are unlikely to be hassled, unless you do something rash like film the slave labour conditions in their foreign-staffed construction sites.
You might just type a bit before you rant on... Yes, I am sure that Kuwait does all manner of nasty, underhanded things (rather like some other countries we mention from time to time) but your comments are uselessly hyperbolic.
I wonder if there is some subtle psychological reasoning behind painting the NASA X-34 white and the military X-37B a shining Darth Vader helmet black....
Slashdot Mirror
This is nothing like the cognitive human brain. This is only a variable memory device.
Variable memory, eh? Perhaps we can use it to replace politicians.
To be fair, there's no evidence at all that evolution has ever occurred in Kentucky.
I am quite sure that all of the prokaryotes in Kentuck are hugely offended that you lumped them together with homo kentuckius.
Ah, thank you. I wish people would write stuff down. I hate YouTube. Maybe I will have to spring for a subscription to $cience.
How many toy robots have been cemented to a pillar supporting a foot bridge?
This week or next week?
have you thought of taking driving lessons?
Who in their right mind would get in a car with him? He's bad luck to the extreme.
If that's our standard, then I should point out that the Boston PD already topped this in the overreaction department back in 2007.
Uh Uh, those had LED lights. Way more dangerous looking. No contest.
It doesn't appear that they have got to the fun bits yet. Research is pretty much at the overview stage. They appear to have some crystallography data that suggests that the arsenic is bound to the DNA which suggests it's replacing the phosphorus backbone, but I don't see anything that shows the critter has replaced ATP (Adenosine TriPhosphate, the cellular power source) with Adenosine TriArsinate.
Of course, one doesn't expect research to just dump everything out at once, there are many years of digging through this to sort it out.
If arsenic is really powering the bacterium, then it's pretty impressive because the thing seems to grow at about 60% of maximum rate in a phosphate depleted source.
I think it's time we had a rating agency for search engines. Something like what Moody's does (or at least is supposed to do) ...
Yeah, like that's worked out really well.
Grrrr. This whole thing seems to be a bit hyped. What they've found is a bug that can live in high concentrations of arsenic BUT requires low concentrations of phosphate. They don't describe the molecular biology at all (at least on the Fox news blurb).
They're throwing this out as a pitch to start opening up their exobiology programs to look for other things other than your garden variety life forms. Gee. SF authors have been pitching this for decades and I'm sure that the NASA teams launching the Mars / Titan probes would be perfectly happy to start enlarging the scope of their experiments if maybe, they were given some half decent funding.
You got the money, honey, I've got the time.
I'm not sure this opens the door to the 'shadow biosphere' much. From a mechanistic and energetic viewpoint, it just shows that you can replace one important, reactive element with another (disclaimer - the devil may be in the details, we really don't know much at this stage - not like that is stopping us).
What it appears to do is give us a bit more leeway in describing conditions that carbon based / nucleic acid based life can form and thrive. I would be most surprised if this turns out to be anything but a previously based phosphorus based organism evolving into using arsenic.
They, however, are certainly keeping the fun details close to their vests.
To expand a bit, look up ATP on wikipedia ...
But anyway, Phosphorus is a fairly energetic element (think boom in the appropriate situations). Life needs energy, which at the molecular level is electron flow. ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) is a molecule used buy ALL living life forms (except perhaps the one we shall learn about soon) to transfer electrons and therefore is sort of a biological battery (maybe capacitor is a better analogy) that stores energy for use in the countless chemical reactions involved in life.
Arsenic is close enough chemically to Phosphorus to screw this up, which it's why it is an effective poison. However, since it is chemically quite similar, what evolution has apparently done (and of course, I'm guessing at the moment) is to substitute Arsenic for Phosphorous in the DNA backbone (DNA is made of four "bases" attached to several Phosphorus atoms, the Phosphorus drives a lot of the chemistry that DNA is involved in).
We already know about some little buggers that use arsenic in place of Phosphorus in a few chemical reactions, but nothing apparently this robust. So it's very interesting, but I do not believe that we have to worry about the aliens from Mono lake becoming our new poisonous overlords.
the environment is mono lake is so different (and hostile to life as we know it) that it might as well be ET.
No, you're thinking of Los Angeles.
Well, what you found isn't what you think you've found. You ran smack dab into a press release.
The chance of the press release meaningfully representing the actual occurrence are slim. As has been pointed out, this is likely to be a DNA (the usual base pairs that belong to us) based organism who has replace phosphorus with arsenic. If you look at the two on the periodic table, they are chemically similar.
Yes, it's very significant. Yes it's very important, however it really appears to be 'life as we know it'.
For fans of astrobiology, it gives us one additional data point to say the molecular mechanisms of life are robust enough to work in environments that were felt to be inhospitable. It opens up the Drake equation to a degree, but it doesn't answer the Fundamental Question (which is NOT 'when is the pizza arriving').
I *warned* you, but did you listen to me? Oh, no, you *knew*, didn't you? Oh, it's just a harmless little search engine, isn't it?
Water leaching from rocks makes sense if there is a motive force such as bacteria digesting rock. There's a whole lot of eating going on.
Ewwww. Ich. Are you saying that the nice white beach is bacterial doo-doo?
That's it! I'm staying in the basement!
(Returning to reality a bit, you might consider physical and chemical forces first, no need to invoke your furry little colonic friends.)
It's quite absurd for you to call Iran dangerous; they haven't been at war for years...
If you're so smart, how come the majority of the Arab leaders in the Middle East vehemently disagree with you?
Except instead of your "hey wouldn't it be totally ironic if anti-bacterial soap made people SICKER!!??" observation, they have identified Triclosan and Bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor with the specific function of inhibiting the immune system not by protecting it from exposure or selectively breeding resistant germs (the two popular "well duh" observations here) but by actually inhibiting the effectiveness of the immune system. Knowing this, as opposed to say "knowing that for sure, antibacterial soaps are totally bad because they don't let your body *learn* about bad germs!!!" is what leads to advances in medicine and pathogen control.
I'm not a doctor but I appreciate what they do.
Let's not get hasty here. They took some data previously collected:
Methods: Using data from the 2003-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we compared urinary bisphenol A (BPA) and triclosan with serum cytomegalovirus antibody levels and diagnosis of allergies or hayfever in US adults and children age 6 years. We used multivariate ordinary least squares linear regression models to examine the association of BPA and triclosan with cytomegalovirus antibody titers, and multivariate logistic regression models to investigate the association of these chemicals with allergy/hayfever diagnosis. Statistical models were stratified by age (
Then ran a series of statistical tests to see if there were any correlations between the body burden of BPA and triclosan and putative proxies for immune function (CMV titer and hayfever diagnosis).
They "adjusted" for a bunch of variables and come out with a correlation between the markers and their effects. They then go on to state that the chemicals may depress immune function.
It may be true but this sort of analysis is prone to a host of problems - poor data collection, poor data analysis, over correlation by the statistical software and god knows what else by the statistical software (disclaimer - I've only read the abstract, I don't know exactly how they did it but unless they have a very good statistician looking over their shoulders, they open to making any one of a number of mistakes).
And of course, our favorite logical fallacy: Correlation implying Causation. Specifically, the charge that the endocrine disruption mechanism of BPA and Triclosan is the cause of the immune changes is not addressed at all. It's simply assumed.
Unfortunately, this is like the vast majority of the literature in these areas. Because good science is so hard to do, we gets lots of these little studies that may or may not mean much of anything. They're fine, it's the way we have to do things, but don't flush all of the soap down the toilet.
Indeed. The problem, as always, is that we need an 'enemy'. Since the Soviet Union did us a disservice my collapsing in the 1990's the powers that be needed to find a convenient one. China? Maybe - but we are locked in an economic menage-a-tois with China, Europe and Japan (OK, that's four). We can snipe at the Chinese, just as one would do with their lover, but dissolving the relationship is going to be really hard.
...
Terrorists, especially Muslim terrorists, are just absolutely perfect in this regard.
Their religion is just different enough to be offensive, their culture is different enough to be offensive and they do some truly offensive things (think behavior towards women). They're small enough to never really be a threat but large enough to act like one. They have their own bat-shit insane actors (think Kadafi and Ahmadinejad). They dress funny. They talk funny. They don't like alcohol and dogs.
Just the perfect balance between being different and truly dangerous and many of them don't particularly like us.
We have always been at war with Islam (which is actually a pretty accurate statement in a number of ways). Now if they would just develop a credible space program
But that is not new. Smaller? Yes, but still an incremental upgrade, nothing is new in that product.
Just what are you expecting? Mr. Fusion in your pocket? A portable transporter? A flying car? (OK, we've been expecting that for years).
You all realize that Apple is a consumer hardware company, do you not? They don't make 787's, Space Shuttles or nuclear weapons. The do seem to make computer related consumer gizmos better than any of their competitors? Yeah, it would me neat if they made a mid sized tower, but it doesn't look like. Yeah, the iPad is ridiculously crippled for everyone hear who wants to control their toaster with it. But Apple seems to make stuff people want, hence it's good year. You can argue whether that's "incremental", "insignificant" or even bleh, but I bet Micheal Dell would like some of whatever it is that Jobs is smmoking.
You had me until the NO CARRIER
Auxiliary not axillary. Sometimes it's best to look at what the spell checker suggests.
So, the idea is to buy an expensive axillary power generation source to help run your expensive electric car?
Pardon me for being, shall we say, a bit negative, but that idea just doesn't charge me up.
Two things:
Really?. Kuwait doesn't seem do too well on the enforcement end of things.
Kuwait does not publish its laws, has no freedom of information - legally or culturally - and sees no problem at all with lying about what the law is. Like all police states, Kuwait would rather that everyone be guilty of something. Enforcement is completely arbitrary - visiting businessmen (better believe I mean 'men') taking snaps are unlikely to be hassled, unless you do something rash like film the slave labour conditions in their foreign-staffed construction sites.
You might just type a bit before you rant on... Yes, I am sure that Kuwait does all manner of nasty, underhanded things (rather like some other countries we mention from time to time) but your comments are uselessly hyperbolic.
I wonder if there is some subtle psychological reasoning behind painting the NASA X-34 white and the military X-37B a shining Darth Vader helmet black....
Great, like the iPad but with the awkwardness of a laptop and the lightweight construction reminiscent of the Osborne I.
Just thought I'd help out a bit.